Alabama Petition Edit

I should be grading my own students' papers, but it's been a long couple of weeks and I could use a diversion. So I graded someone I didn't teach instead. Perhaps you've seen the petition posted by an angry Alabama fan, pseudonymously referring to himself as "TC,"  asking the NCAA to make Alabama and Auburn play an overtime period (or an "overtime play," if you prefer) because Chris Davis was clearly out of bounds.

The petition, as it turns out, has a few errors. Because I assume that the writer must have gone to the University of Alabama based on his level of interest in the outcome of this amateur matchup between student athletes, and because I am, after all, a college teacher myself, I decided to make a few corrections. I'm just trying to be helpful.

I realize that this is not a piece of formal writing, but an online petition, so I've overlooked certain things in keeping with the looser genre conventions of informal online writing (I am a great believer that grammar is situated in context). For this reason, I have not "corrected" capitalized letters where I know they are being used for effect, sentences that begin with conjunctions (since I also do this when stylistically appropriate), or omitted commas where these omissions have become more-or-less common practice.

Anyway, here are my corrections. Hope this helps, TC:

Erasure of Race, and Other Things That Don't Help

My friend (and former research subject) Crystal posted a post this morning by Jen Yamato at Deadline.com about the minor scandal at the USA Today when they used the headline “Holiday Nearly Beat Thor as Race-Themed Films Soar" to lead a story about the success of The Best Man Holiday. Certainly, there is plenty to criticize in the insidiously reductive phrase "race-themed," a phrase that suggests that the movie is actually about race. This was a no doubt unintentional but nevertheless troubling gaffe, to be sure. There is something slightly unseemly about suggesting a genre that is Black Film. Yet, I find Yamato's response troubling as well.

Yamato acknowledges that "mainstream media seems to have trouble characterizing a film like this," then she offers the suggestion that "maybe the simplest route is to call it a Romantic Comedy." Certainly, this route is simple. It has the benefit of refusing to characterize the film based only on the race of its characters. This allows us to avoid any suggestion that we might be racist, since we don't even bring race up.

This follows a typical post-race approach of trying to simply pretend that race does't exist. To do this, we must also ignore a defining characteristic of the film, since surely the choice to cast all African American characters was purposeful. To pretend that this is not the case is to disallow  discussion about these artistic and political choices.

One of the salient features of films like this one is that they place African Americans is positions of economic privilege. Thus, they write African Americans into subject positions generally dominated by whites in both film and society at large. In this film, and others like it (suggesting that perhaps there is indeed an emerging genre here), African American characters are the center of the action, rather than at the periphery. Furthermore, they are characterized as wealthy, educated, well connected, and highly nuanced. Again, all subject positions typically thought of as white.

These films, therefore, create a really interesting counter-history, one that deserves serious critical attention. This hypothetical counter-history allows us to question why such portrayals are so rare in our plays and films and, more importantly, why they are so rare in society. They allow us to ask why these films seem so out of the ordinary that gaffes like the one made by USA Today are even possible. For, indeed, what is so strange about these films is that they don't portray African Americans in the way films generally have in US culture: as poor, or downtrodden, or as gang members--in other words, why they are allowed to be just like white people.

Such questions should trouble our thinking about American film art, and the modern myth that we are post-race at all. Of course, such questions are not possible if we pretend that race does not exist, if we commit an erasure by failing to note exactly what it is that makes these films so unique. While it may be inappropriate to to evaluate these films on race alone, since indeed there are other plot elements and genre conventions at work, it is also inappropriate to refuse to address it. Criticizing the USA Today for myopically referring to these films as "race-themed," does not mean that we should ignore that race is indeed one of the themes. Doing so only ensures that we continue to pretend that race is no longer a contested subject in need to sustained critical reflection. Such erasures are, therefore, just as injurious as what Yamato set out to criticize.

If a [Digital] Tree Falls in a Forest Full of Falling Trees, Does Anyone Hear It?

In our Teaching College Composition class, we have just discussed J. Elizabeth Clark's "The Digital Imperative: Making the Case for a 21st-Century Pedagogy," a response to Kathleen Blake Yancey's work and call to arms for composition teachers to take up "the digital imperative" by involving our students in engaging digital literacies. Obviously, I'm a supporter of the use of technology to teach and theorize writing (hence, this blog). Many of the literacy skills called for by Yancey, Blake, and others are, indeed, imperatives. But there was one section of Clark's piece that troubled me and that I think smacks a little of what Lanksheare and Knobel have called "boon theory." For Lanksheare and Knobel, this is one half of a binary that includes both "bane" and "boon." For boon thinkers, technology is a panacea, the thing that will finally cure social ills, provide universal access to powerful literacy tools, give agency to those currently without it, and so on. Certainly, the piece as a whole does not display this, as part of its exigency is Clark's understanding that the digital world requires new sorts of critical literacy for our students. Yet, her description some of her particular classroom activities gave me pause.

Her composition courses, or at least those she discusses here, involve online activities including ePortfolios and blogs, which her students are required to perform. In addition to giving students hands on experience with the types of composing many of them will be expected to do in life outside academe, Blake claims that "when they tell their multimodal stories and share them on the internet, their education has an immediate impact on their lives and their interests, allowing them to put their new skills--like research and multimodal composition--into play immediately for audiences that may include their family, their friends, and even wider publics" (32).

Indeed, one of the most promising aspects of including digital components to Composition classrooms is the possibility of building a sense of audience for our students. By writing in forums that are indeed public, it is hoped, our students will have actual audiences beyond us as teachers. Because of this, says Blake, "our students feel pressured to create effective arguments and to respond to critiques of this arguments" (34). It was exactly this possibility that led me to include a blogging component to my composition classes at Oklahoma State in 2010-2011. I believed that asking my students to publish in forums where their writing was indeed public would both cause them to think about forming arguments for actual audience, and that it would also give them a personal investment in the writing that would lead to greater engagement. However, I found that this was not necessarily the case.

In order to give my students a sense of having a real audience, I did a couple of things. The first is that I created a mother-ship blog that gave them potential blogging topics (which related to our course readings), and provided links to blogs by other student groups. Students were required to respond to at least one other blog, but encouraged to read and respond to several. My desire was that we would be able to establish a kind of online community between my two sections in which a healthy and interesting dialogue would take place. The second thing I did was to recruit friends outside the university to respond to some of the first questions I posed. The idea here was to give students the sense that people outside our class, and even our university, would be able to read and respond to these public blogs.

Ultimately, however, I saw little awareness of audience in my students' blog posts. They were often very short, riddled with typos suggesting that students were not proofing their posts, and often read like direct responses to the teacher. In other words, what I saw was that students treated their blogs as if they were simply electronic versions of in-class journals. To be sure, some of the problems were due to the way I assigned the blogs.

For one thing, blogs were written in groups. I intended to do double duty with the blogs in giving students experience both in online writing and in collaborative writing, an important skill in the modern workplace. This meant that whatever wash't finished in the classroom time devoted to blogging had to be finished by the students over the weekend. Most groups ended up simply taking turns finishing the blog over the weekend rather than trying to make time to meet with one another.

Another problem was that the class time devoted to writing blogs was often insufficient. The idea was that students would come prepared with ideas in mind (I eventually created a space on the classes' Online Classrooms, a format similar to Blackboard to encourage discussion prior to class), then they would actually do the compositions in class. Often, however, most of the time spent in class was devoted to settling on a topic, leaving much of the composition itself to occur over the weekend outside of class. Considering the wide range of quality across the posts, I suspect that other group members rarely revised or proofed the post, leaving it entirely to the group member whose "turn" it was.

These problems, either of which could be easily overcome, suggest that students did not necessarily feel more involvement in their blog writing knowing that there was a real audience. Ultimately, I suspect that they understood that their audience was neither large, nor actually public. Students understand, perhaps better than we do, that the sheer volume of communication now being performed online means that just because something can be seen by a public audience does't mean it will be. Students seem to feel that their online, school-based writing is going to be buried by the mass of information now online. Their writing is a tree falling in a forest full of falling trees; their voices are drowned out in the cacophony.

This is not to say that these forms of writing don't still have value, or even that they can't help our students develop a sense of audience. This is only to say that they won't automatically do so. We will still have to work to create real rhetorical situations for our students by creating writing opportunities that will encourage students to build their own audiences. In other words we want students to be performing writing tasks that they will care about and be proud of, enough so that they will advertise their writing to "their family, their friends, and even wider publics" (Blake 32).

Part of this will require us to make these forms of writing more central to our classes. At OSU (as with the university where I now teach) there were programmatic requirements that a certain percentage of the final grade be based on program-wide rather standardized essays. This means that the electronic writing portions of my classes are relatively small, and the students responded accordingly. After all, our students are budgeting their time, therefore they will privilege the assignments that our grading scales privilege. Other types of writing will be seen as extras, or even busy work. After all, in our classes, the grade will always be more important than any audience. So, if we wish for audiences to matter to our students, these audiences must also be important to us.

Where Does a Claim Come From?

I've been struggling this week to help my students understand how to arrive at a claim through synthesis of sources. Traditional composition classes have often involved writing assignments that allow ready-made opinion based claims. The model that I learned under years ago (I took only Comp 2, having tested out of Comp 1) involved getting students to argue about politics then turning this into writing. It was a model that was pedagogically vacuous for many reasons, but one of the most important was that it allowed us to make claims based on our own already held untested opinions. So, for the most part, we were simply regurgitating already held beliefs in terms of a three part thesis (Claim, evidence 1, evidence 2, evidence 3, transition).

Even the more sophisticated assignments I have given to students over the past several years have been confined enough that claims were limited to only a handful of possibilities. My auto-ethnography assignment tends to encourage claims about how the activities of a group are related to certain ethics of the group. My scholarly problem paper tells students to write about an important current conversation in the field, so this allows students to appropriate the claims of others. My other assignments re similarly constrained. Certainly, it's not possible (or less possible) to plug in the political opinions taught to them at home as claims, but the assignments still lead students to claims through the prompts. The assignment I'm starting with this semester, on the other hand, is much broader. It's based on synthesis of essays by four authors. The assignment doesn't, in and of itself, offer a research question that will lead more directly to a claim. For this reason, the possibilities are far less constrained, and the claims may be much more far flung. So long as the reading suggest these claims in an articulable way, the claim is appropriate.

The Need for a Heuristic: 

What this means is that, perhaps for the first time, I'm faced with the task of helping students develop claims in the much more open ways that I am used to working in. My students struggle to come up with claims that they feel are appropriate to the conversation, a conversation that they are, after all, just entering. They are, like I was, used to using ready-made arguments, in which they simply plug new pieces of evidence into claims they already hold.

Thus, I have been struggling to think of a heuristic to help my students understand where ideas come from. How do academic writers develop claims? Though, as an academic writer, I am developing claims from research all the time, I have not really engaged in a meta-discursive analysis of how this happens. Thus, when students stay after class to ask what I mean when I tell them that they should develop a claim to base their papers on, the process is almost as mysterious to me as it is to them. To use language Doug Downs might, I have "process knowledge" regarding how to arrive at claims, but I don't have the "declarative knowledge" to help my students do the same. This means I am having difficulty arrived at a useful heuristic to give to students.

In lieu of a helpful, more comprehensive heuristic of where claims come from, I've decided here to at least trace my own process in order to provide an example for students of how a claim happens, what influences go into making a claim, and what I do with it after I've found it. I'm writing this with two audiences in mind: my students who have, no doubt, already gone through the first steps of this process but now must figure out what to do from here, and to fellow instructors who want to help students understand where ideas come from and who want to understand this ourselves. Thus, what follows is a narrative about how reading leads to particular claims.

Arriving at a Claim: A Process Approach:

In the first unit of this semester, students engaged in the Writing about Writing approach here at OU have read four essays, which they must synthesize into an essay centered around an argumentative claim. These essays, in the order we read them, are: John Swales "The Concept of Discourse Community," James Paul Gee "Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction," James Porter "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community," and Joseph Harris "The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing." All these essays, as suggested by their titles, involve the ongoing discussion of discourse community--what one is, how it works, and how folks get into one.

Swales offers a definition if discourse community, asserting that it's a concept that has been under discussion but which has not yet been carefully defined. In order to theorize a definition, he offers six criteria that any language community must meet in order to be called a discourse community. Important for this discussion is his final criteria that "a discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise" (473). His explanation of this criteria explains that a community will have levels of membership. Some will be experienced, subject area experts, while others will be novice or apprentice members. Members will come and go so that there is a range of experience and expertise in any discourse community.

Gee, on the other hand, has a much different idea about Discourse membership (by the way, his use of "Discourse" rather than "discourse community" is notable, as it projects certain attitudes toward the idea of "community").  For Gee, one is either in the Discourse or one isn't. There is no provisional membership. As he says it, "one cannot engage in a Discourse in a less than fully fluent manner" (487).  For Gee, one is apprenticed into a Discourse but is not fully a member until the group itself accepts the new member, which involves vesting the member with "social goods" (487).Thus, the salient difference between Swales and Gee is their understanding of how one gets into a community. For Swales, there is a process of enculturation where membership is, for a while at least, provisional and partial. For Gee, one is "mushfaking" (490) until one is admitted. Gee goes on to suggest that we should teach our students to engage in mushfake until one is accepted. At this time, the student can decide whether or not to fully engage as a full member or to subvert the discourse and rebel against it.

In reading this last part of Gee's argument, I notice that this seems to suggest a certain attitude toward Discourse. Why would we want to teach our students to subvert the Discourses they have worked hard to enter? The logical assumption here is that Gee doesn't think much of Discourses. Gee's argument about how one gets into a Discourse, which is that one must be admitted by the group, suggests that, to Gee, a Discourse is a good old boys' club--a hierarchal structure designed to let some in and keep others out. Gee seems to hold a psuedo-Marxist attitude toward Discourses as oppressive structures, otherwise, it makes no sense to want to empower students to overthrow it.

I want to take the time here to point out that my interpretation of Gee's attitude toward Discourse is necessarily influenced by my own perspectives and experiences. I notice these things and develop these interpretations because I have been exposed to Marxist critical theory, and critical pedagogy which stresses the importance of a de-centered classroom. So, my own views of the world and background in rhetorical and educational theory has caused me to notice certain things and interpret them in particular ways. And this is okay, because my interpretation, although personal, is nevertheless plausible. I can show that it is a reasonable interpretation and argue effectively for it. Thus, I am beginning to formulate a claim centered around Gee's ideas about Discourse membership and the possibly oppressive nature of Discourse.

This early claim is bolstered when we get to Porter's essay, which I am now reading with my early claim at least rattling around in the back of my mind. Porter, which is talking primarily about intertextuality as definitive of a discourse community (we're not communities in the traditional sense of shared space, language, etc, but in terms of shared textual practices, canonical texts, etc), claims that "our goal should be to help students learn to write for the discourse communities they choose to join" (94). He goes on to say that "our immediate goal is to produce 'socialized' writers who are full-fledged members of their discourse community, producing competent, useful discourse within that community" (95, emphasis added).

Here, I notice that Porter's goal of helping students enter their discourse communities is altogether different than Gee's goal to help students subvert them. Seeing other scholars suggest that we should help students join (which suggests that a discourse community is a good thing) bolsters my claim that Gee thinks Discourses are perhaps bad.

So now I have a solid claim that I can run with. Of course, my goal is not just to talk about Gee, but to synthesize all these essays. For this reason, I find that I need to broaden this claim in order to account for the other authors. So I expand my claim in order to come to a tentative claim that will include these other authors.

So my claim becomes something like this: These authors' views of discourse community membership, especially regarding the ways in which people join them, are connected to their attitudes about discourse communities.

Now I have a guiding idea that I can use to approach a paper. This acts as my thesis statement. My process now becomes using the texts to test this claim. As I write and revise a paper, I revisit the texts looking for evidence that these authors' understanding of membership might be guided by their attitudes toward communities, that is, whether they think these communities are good and that we ought to help students get in, or that they are bad and we ought to help students navigate them well enough that they can change them. This evidence becomes the body of my paper.

Conclusion:

This is the process I have undergone in formulating a claim based on these readings. As a student searching for a claim, the trick is to pay attention to the things you are noticing as you read. These things will be based on context. This is to say that you will notice different things based on your own views of the world, education, and pure chance. This is fine. Be comfortable with this, as it is part of the intertextuality Porter talks about.

When you notice things in a text, begin asking questions about these things. These are often referred to as the "so what" or "why" questions. What might these things you've noticed say about what you are reading? Why are these authors talking about things in these ways? The answers to these questions become early claims which guide the rest of your reading. If these early claims remain plausible or if they are in fact bolstered by further reading, you've developed a thesis for your paper. If not, you will begin noticing other things as you read further, and one of these will develop into a claim.

I have no doubt that there are other processes at work in developing claims, and other ways to come to them. But hopefully this will be helpful in helping us understand how claims come to be. Hopefully, by "watching" as I develop a claim, the reader will see these processes at work in himself or herself and will know how to turn these into workable claims.

Advocacy and Agency: On Being a Highly Literate Parent

Allow me to say from the outset that, in this piece, I run the risk of being too forthcoming with regard to my personal life, but it comes from a desire to make sense of my own experiences and to relate them to important lessons for my field. We have just begun the process of having our son, Aodan, evaluated for an Autism Spectrum Disorder. This comes after having seen red flags since the time he was a year and a half or two years old (though we would also probably give anecdotal evidence that he was weird even in utero).  We also don't yet know exactly what we're looking at--if it is in fact as ASD, which all of us who are dealing with him suspect, or possibly something else, like ADHD or even OCD. But Aodan is a bright and sociable child (at least with the many people he knows), so I have little doubt that with proper interventions he can be successful both as a student and in his social life.

Nevertheless, along the road, we have already had incidents in which we have had to deal with behavioral issues. I should note here that Aodan also has epilepsy, for which he takes medication. His first medication was a real problem for him as it made his behavior, whether good or bad, a bit more extreme that it otherwise would have been. This, along with the issues that have led us to these evaluations, have led to at least two incidents where we have had to actively advocate on behalf of our son to keep him in his school.

The first was in his day care last year. This particular daycare is a K3 program, which means that they see themselves as a legitimate school with a full curriculum. As such, they encourage parents not to keep children out of school unnecessarily, as doing so will deprive them of learning. This is one of the reasons we had our children in this day care. But last year, as Aodan began having problems in class, the school began calling us to pick him up because he had been removed from class. Charissa would have to take off to go get him or my father-in-law would pick him up and keep him for the rest of the day. Obviously, this did not sit well with me, especially since the logic of the place was that students were learning and needed to be there. So, for me, his removal from the classroom amounted to a willingness to rob my child of his educational opportunities simply because he was hard to deal with. So, on a day that Charissa had gone to pick him up and taken him to her school where I later picked him up, I went to the school and asked to meet with the director and his teacher's supervisor (surprisingly for a school that size, these were two different people).

I explained to them that I felt that in a school that makes it a point to remind parents that their students shouldn't miss because they would be missing curriculum, the assumption seems to be that this is real and important education. Since this was the case, it was a major problem that my child was missing out on his opportunities. For me, if they were going to sell themselves and organize themselves as a K3 school, they must also have in place the mechanisms that other schools would have, namely, the training and resources to deal with children with learning differences. They needed interventional strategies. They admitted that they did not have this kind of training but that it is something that they agree they should have. The conversation ended with their assurances that they would try to find ways to keep him in school. It was the last time he was sent home from daycare.

This year, the incidents which have led to his finally being evaluated, also landed us in an administrator's office as we had to discuss the possibility that Aodan could be removed from the Open Door program. This is a voluntary program that allows kids to stay in the school building for daycare before and after Pre-K instead of being transported to a different site. Since it is a voluntary program, he doesn't have to be allowed to remain in the program if they deem him to be a problem. After a write up on the very first week of school, my wife and I found ourselves in a meeting once again having to advocate for our son.

This meeting was much more cordial than the one I had had with the daycare the year before. For one thing, these were professional educators in a public school. They knew what they were looking at. So, this meeting mostly focused on how to intervene, how the teacher could see the signs that Aodan was over-stimulated or escalating, and what to do when those things happened. For another thing, these were both people who my wife had worked with in the past. For this reason, these administrators knew that we were educated and involved parents, which protected him from the tendency to write our child off as the bad son of bad parents. Thus, instead of these meetings being situations in which the school was explaining to us that and why they were kicking my son out, we were instead working on solutions to keep him there and help him be successful.

As a literacy scholar interested in access, I have wondered how this experience might be different for a family with less agency. My wife and I make a formidable pair, sitting across the table from school administrators. I'm an experienced college instructor and PhD students in literacy. I also happen to be physically imposing. My wife is an innovative and experienced teacher, a former teacher of the year with an interest in curriculum development for children with special needs, who is currently working on universal design schemes for her music classroom. We out-credential most of the administrators and teachers we come into contact with. This gives us a great deal of agency when advocating for our son, agency not often available to parents who are "less literate."

James Paul Gee, in his book The Anti-Education Era, points out that, "formal schooling is often like this. People are placed in hierarchies where small differences often translate eventually into big ones" (80). This is due to phenomenon noted by Gee known as "kick theory." The way this operates is that small differences early in the educational process eventually translate into large advantages later on. This is because a person who shows an early advantage, even a small one, in a certain area receives a "kick" in a particular direction that will lead to greater advantage. As this process continues and repeats, the person who showed an advantage gets kicked further and further up the ladder. Inversely, I suspect, the person who did not hold the initial advantage initially will get kicked down the ladder.

In his psuedo-scholarly memoir Lives on the Boundary, UCLA professor and literacy expert Mike Rose points out that, "judgements about [students'] ability are made at a very young age, and those judgements, accurate or not, affect the curriculum they receive, their place in the school, they way they're defined institutionally" (128). So, as early as Pre-K in Aodan's case, schools are making decisions about where he will be placed. This necessarily effects the kind of education he will receive. Of course, education has come a long way in understanding and learning how to handle learning differences and disabilities. Far more often than when I was a child, students are mainstreamed into regular classrooms where they are exposed to the same material as every other student. But there remains the risk that a child may be removed to a severe to profound program, special classes, and so on.

Temple Grandin, the renowned Colorado State University animal scientist and agricultural engineer, who also happens to have autism, speaks often about the importance of careful intervention by way of language tutoring, social training and so on in helping children with autism succeed. For me, there are important access issues at stake in these conversations. Grandin attributes her success to the important interventions provided by involved parents of means and quality teachers. Her parents (her mother in particular) were able to provide her with very intensive language therapy and tutoring early on, and they were intentional about filling her life with the kinds of extra-curricular activities that gave her purpose and a sense of belonging. Children who have not had access to such interventions may have far fewer opportunities to overcome their "disabilities."

With our level of education and our connections to the people who run the educational systems in which our children are being taught, Charissa and I have a great deal of agency and ability to provide the things Grandin mentions--things that will help our boys to be "kicked" in the right direction. We will be able to provide interventional strategies that make it much more likely that Aodan will have just as much opportunity to succeed as Beckett, up to and including educating him ourselves.

Less literate, less well-connected, or less priviledged parents are in a much different situation. They may not have the agency to successfully fight with schools who may find it easier just to hide their children in order to keep test scores up. They may not have the resources to pose a serious legal threat to schools who fail to provide equal opportunities for their children. As literacy workers, we need to be aware of these access issues and look for ways to provide agency through advocacy and training for those that need it if they are to advocate for their own children in the ways I'm able to advocate for mine. We have a responsibility to make our public schools as egalitarian as possible, and this is not possible unless all students have equal access to resources that allow them to succeed.

The Impostor Syndrome and University Education, or How Apprenticeship Saved Me

The few days ago, as I walked across the campus of the University of Oklahoma, appreciating the cool morning air and the austerity of the empty campus, with its red-brick gothic and whitewashed neoclassical buildings, I was struck by how different I feel coming to this campus now than I did when I first came to OU as a freshman.

These days, as I walk across the campus, I feel at home here. The recognizable architecture, the landscaping, and the rhythm of a university feels warmly familiar to me. I have, after all, spent much of my adult life at universities. They are where I have done my best and favorite work. So, when I step onto just about any university campus, especially after spending time in the bleak, cheaply built hallways of municipal government, I feel at home, as a child might feel in the warmth of a grandmother's house--if grandma were brilliant and wealthy.

As a freshman, however, I did not feel this way. The university was an intimidating place for me in 1997, as it no doubt is for many freshman today. Though I was living at home, and had several friends from high school there, I was surrounded by people I did not know. I had attended a large high school, with a graduating class of 529. But OU, a relatively large research institution, had more than ten times the number students as my high school (with about 20,000 undergraduates). I had been a successful student in high school with relatively little effort. I had played hockey, been first chair in the band, been in the top chorus, and was the president of the drama club. Yet now I was at a place where nobody cared about all that. Everybody here had been those things. And now I wondered whether or not I belonged. The people were smart, and the campus was huge and beautiful. I, on the other hand, suddenly felt very average. I was the oldest son of parents who had only been to junior college, and who had been working full time jobs and paying their own bills when they were my age. But here I was, spending their money and trying to blend in with really smart kids from wealthy homes (it seemed to me). I felt like an impostor, waiting to be found out.

I did okay at first, but I felt very small. I went from being in first chair in high school to second chair in the second band at OU.  I went from being a relatively popular student to being part of a mass of freshman who no one knew. I saw upper class-men wearing high school letter jackets and proclaiming it to be "Make Fun of Freshmen Day." I didn't know the words, or even the tunes, to the songs we sung to make fun of the Longhorns on OU/Texas weekend. I wasn't invited to away games.The professors didn't know my name and the TAs seemed to see me as a burden. I didn't drink or join a fraternity, and when I went to parties where everyone else was, I was scared to death and I just wanted to go home.

I didn't make it as a freshman. In my second semester, I decided to change my major and I quit taking my music education classes very seriously. I didn't go to the Group Piano final. But I did better in that class than I did in Math for Critical Thinking, a math class that didn't seem to have much math in it. I went to the lecture a few times and sat in the back of a lecture room with about 130 other students where I couldn't see the notes being written on the overhead because I thought I looked stupid in my glasses.  I quit going entirely, thinking I could keep up with the material in the lab. When I realized I couldn't, I quit going to that too. I also stopped going to a Geology class where the professor seemed to enjoy making jokes about "creationists" which at the time I was totally unable to put in perspective. I wasn't offended that he made fun of Christians; I was afraid he would find out I was one and he would think I was stupid. I was starting to become convinced that I was.

After that semester, I was placed on academic probation. I knew that I could retake one of my failing grades and that it would be replaced on my transcript, so I signed up for the summer semester to retake the Geology class, since it would fulfill a general education requirement. The only thing I remember about the class is that it was in Sarkeys (a sky scraper on campus that is rumored to be closing soon due to structural problems) and that the professor talked a lot about Calcium Feldspar. I still don't know what that is. I started going to my girlfriend's house instead of class, and I was suspended after the summer semester.

I served out my suspension at a community college, but I never returned to OU as an undergraduate (in fact, when I got accepted into the PhD program at OU, I had to clear the academic hold from my suspension 15 years before). Instead, I transferred to Harding University, a much smaller and much more expensive Liberal Arts university.

I flourished at Harding. For one thing, I had followed my girlfriend (who I've now been married to for twelve years). This was not trivial. Not only did I have someone to complain to, cry to, and so on, but she was an excellent student. She hung out with people who got together in the student center for study groups, people for whom knowledge was a social event, central to their daily lives. I've since come to learn (and this is an epistemological grounding in my field) that knowledge making is itself a community act. Not only did we learn from one another, but we made learning a privileged social activity. Harding, it seemed to me, was a place where the the smart kids were the cool kids. Also, these people had been here for a couple years already by the time I transferred in as a third year student. This meant that I had people to show me around, people of whom I felt comfortable asking questions. I was privy to insider knowledge that helped me navigate the terrain.

As importantly, I encountered faculty who, unlike those who stood in front of the 130 person lecture rooms of my freshman year, seemed to have a personal investment in my life. One in particular became, and remains, a mentor to me. Steve and Dottie Frye were both professors in my theatre department. Steve taught theory and history, and Dottie was the director of a theatre troupe I was in. I became very close to them both and, along with scores of other students, considered them surrogate parents. I think I gravitated a bit more toward Steve because I was a young man in need of role models.

In my senior year, I worked for Steve and Dottie as an assistant. It was in Steve's office that I decided that I wanted to teach in the university.  Steve kept in his office a jar of bite sized candy bars and a refrigerator full of Coke. Students would put 50 cents into a coffee cup on top of the fridge and take a Coke. We would generally then sit and talk for a while. His office became a lounge for his students. We would drink Coke, and talk to him and each other about the subject matter of his classes or about life outside of it. This made him both a very involved teacher and also a confidant.  Those of us who were in Dottie's troupe were also frequent visitors to their home. We ate together and played with her kids. I even did laundry there from time to time.

The importance of this kind of relationship cannot be overstated. Not only were there important social and emotional benefits to these relationships, but there were important pedagogical implications as well.  Many students experience what is often called "impostor syndrome." This is the jarring and disillusioning feeling that I don't actually belong here. That I am, in fact, not good enough, not smart enough for this new place. I was a mistake by the admissions office and any day now, everyone is going to find out. I'm doomed to failure.

One of the most important aspects of my relationships with the Fryes is that it initiated me into the academic community. A couple years ago, I found a paper that I wrote for one of Steve's classes. It was called "The Rise of the Greek Theatre and the Vast Confusion Surrounding that Rise" or something like that. As I think about the essay now, even the title seems trite. It was full of very commonplace information and arguments that, at the time, I thought were rather daring and new. It was a startling bit of juvenilia. Yet I remember vividly that Steve took it very seriously. I remember working on it with him in his office, and being treated like a serious scholar when I turned it in. I considered becoming a theatre historian. Likewise, when I brought a play into his office, a terrible tragic romance in one act, he insisted that plays are meant to be heard, and so we staged a reading in his office. Again, he took it completely seriously, praising me for my flair for dialogue and giving feedback on the lacking plot (I'm wording this more strongly here than he did ). Years later, when I asked him for a reference for a PhD application (one of many I'd asked him for) after I had been working as a police officer for several years, he told me, "I've always thought you'd be happier in the life of the mind."

It made all the difference for me to be taken seriously. It was an emphatic signal that I did in fact belong. When I got to Harding, I had to work. My classes were being paid for by loans that I am now paying off. It would be tempting to repeat the often made argument that having to pay for my education made me care about it more. Such an argument, at least for me, would be a fallacy. I didn't take my studies seriously because of my own financial investment (I really had no concept of what it would be like to pay those loans off). I took my studies seriously because I was treated seriously. I was made to feel like this was what I was good at--that this is where I belonged. It wasn't my investment that made me want to do well; it was others' investment in me. Even now, I feel the pressure to do well so that I don't let Steve down. Others who have invested in me have been added to that concern: Matt Hollrah who trained me as a teacher and who is partnering with me in a serious literacy work, Ron Brooks who tried to talk me out of leaving OSU, and Lynn Lewis who got pissed and started making phone calls when I didn't get admitted to OU last year.

I still feel the sinking pull of Impostor Syndrome. I felt it when I returned to graduate school four years after I earned my B.A. I felt it when I began a PhD at Oklahoma State and I feel it now that I continue it at Oklahoma a school that denied my application four times before admitting me this year, and where I have now returned full circle. I have no doubt that I will feel it again when I defend a dissertation and when I enter a flooded and embattled academic job market.

But now I feel comfortable, and that makes all the difference. I imagine what the university must look like to students who have come from less privileged backgrounds and I fear for them. What must the beautiful austerity of campus look like to a student who has come from a crumbling, neglected inner city school? How intimidating must the large and impersonal classrooms of lower-division classes seem to those who feel the pressure of starting from behind? How disorienting must this place be to those who have so often been made to feel unwelcome, who were never "good enough" to go to schools attended by the young men and women who now surround them? What must the thirteen story freshman dorms feel like to a student from a town less populous than any one of those buildings (3% of our incoming freshman class comes from towns smaller than their dorm). What does a student think when he hears his suite mates complain about a dorm room that looks much like the project apartment he lived in before he got here?

David Bartholomae, Mike Rose, and others have written about the importance of being initiated into discourse communities--of the careful apprenticeship between faculty and new scholars. As our universities continue to become more diverse, this process becomes all the more vital. Relationships between students and other students, faculty, and even the physical space of the university must be carefully and purposefully cultivated. Our pedagogy must be infused by and must begin with relationship. We must learn to be Fryes.

Are you sure you want to be a Christian Nation?

This time of year, many of us will likely hear from our Christian pulpits pseudo-patriotic sermons about how important it is that we get back to being a Christian Nation, as we were when we were founded. Many of us have grown accustomed to hearing a similar statement from the prayers of those who open our services. Especially in this part of the country, where Christianity has oddly become connected to conservative politics, we have heard more and more often prayers that we will "return to the Christian principles upon which we were founded." I am always uncomfortable when I hear such prayers for many reasons. Furthermore, and this is what I will address here, anytime I hear this prayer, I wonder if the person speaking the prayer really understands what he is asking for. When he asks that we "return" to the Christian principles upon which we were founded, does he have a good understanding of what those principles were?

I suspect that he assumes that the Christianity of his founding fathers was similar to his own, and what he is asking for is that his particular understanding of Christianity would influence and in fact guide the policy of our government. But of course, it is usually not the case. Though it is indeed the case that our founding documents professed to be founded upon Christian principles (a claim worth critiquing in it's own right, though this is not the purpose here), what these principles were are not necessarily consistent with the modern Christian principles of many of the people I hear making these prayers. The fact is, the Christianity of our nation's founders looked quite a bit different than our own. Here, I am using these differences in order to challenge this contemporary desire to "restore" Christianity to our government, in order to question whether or not this really is what we want.

I wish to foreground this discussion by pointing out that, whether for right or wrong, our concepts of Christianity are intimately connected to our own cultural milieu. Here is an example. In our Sunday morning class, we are currently studying the letters of John. In his first letter, John seems to address a specific popular early heresy that held that Jesus could not have actually been human, but had been spirit all along. He, according to this teaching, only appeared to be human. In order to understand how such an heresy is possible, it is helpful to understand the cosmology of ancient Greek philosophy, which was dominant in the Hellenized first century Roman world. The Greek view divides existence into three planes. An Ideal plane exists in which the perfect version of everything lives. This plane is a bit of an abstraction, but think of it as heaven, where everything we know is present, but in its perfect form. There is then the physical plane, where we and everything we experience exists. Finally, there is artifice--things that humans make. These are copies of the physical world, which is itself a copy of the Ideal. The important thing to know here is that things degenerate as they move down the level of existence. Physical things are imperfect versions of the Ideal. Built things (art in particular, according to Plato) are the lowest form of existence, because these things are copies of copies. The heresy John addresses is made possible because, for people enmeshed in this cosmology, it is unthinkable that God (who exists in a perfect plane) could possibly be manifested in the physical (imperfect) realm. Since God is perfect, he cannot exist in imperfection, therefore, he could have only appeared to be physical.

The point here is to show that we extrinsically link our understandings of scripture with our understanding of the world. Most of the time, we do not even know that this is what we are doing. After explaining this concept in class, I drew parallels between this and Christian thought in the modern western world, which borrows much of our thinking from the Greeks. We still imagine a similar separation between a spiritual realm and a physical one--a spiritual existence and a physical one.  For this reason, we see our spirit and our physical bodies as being somehow distinct. We don't recognize, and most of the time we don't even know, that this view of things comes as much from Plato as it does from the Bible (much of the Old Testament defies such a separation of spirit and body, and sees the separation of the spirit from the body at death a decidedly bad thing [Ecc 9:10]), but we nevertheless infuse our interpretations of scripture with this way of viewing the world. This view of things influences, to some extent, our understanding of spiritual warfare, and baptism (which is either a necessary outward expression of an inward change or an unnecessary work), and is evident in phrases like "heart issue" (as if the heart can feel one way while the body behaves in another).

The purpose here is to show how our view of the way things work, views which often come from places other than the Bible, influences how we interpret the Bible and, thus, what it means to be a Christian. So now I intend to turn my attention to how our founding fathers saw the world, how that seems to have influenced their Christianity, and whether or not this type of Christianity is what we want to return to (By the way, it is in no way settled what it means to call the founders "Christian" at all. Some of them clearly were; some of them clearly were not. For most, such discussions rely on arguments of definition).

The drafters of our founding documents were incredibly educated (and fabulously wealthy) men, steeped in the European philosophies of Enlightenment. Just as the Platonic philosophies discussed above assumed a particular cosmology which influenced the early Christians' understanding of the gospel, so did the Enlightenment philosophies that influenced our founders. The Enlightenment view of created order is often explained as a Chain of Being (a concept that actually comes from the Middle Ages), in which created things exist in a chain from most complex to least. Things low on the chain were the least complex and least meaningful. Things high on the chain were the most complex, the most intelligent, and held the most agency--that is control over their own lives and destinies. Human beings, who are created in the image of God, are of course the highest thing in the physical realm of the chain of being. They are the pinnacle of creation, little gods in their own right, since they were, of course, created to rule over the earth. The have more agency, in other words, than anything except God himself.

This understanding of created order existing on a chain is and was metaphorical. The actual implication of this cosmology was that, to the thinking of educated men in the eighteenth century, things were very carefully created in order to function in a certain way. This philosophy assumes a value laden creation in which things work in an orderly fashion, unbroken by the "fallen" condition of man. The eighteenth century colonial view of God was a far cry from the one presented in Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." The logical outcrop of such understanding is that God can be, and was, lasses faire in his involvement with creation. The optimistic eighteenth-century view of God was as a benign but mostly uninvolved creator. He certainly intervened in human affairs in important moments (and, of course, our Revolution would often be presented as just such a moment), but he mostly stayed out of the way. This is because he had created man to be innately logical. He was endowed with Reason (capital R). Man could, therefore, take care of himself. For political thinkers, social problems like crime and poverty were caused by intrusions from a corrupt and oppressive governments. A man stripped of his "God given" ability to take care of himself would naturally rebel in order to restore his proper position on the Chain, where God created him to be. If the government would just get out of the way, man would use Reason to deliver himself.

This thinking is all over our founding documents. Indeed, the founding documents of the United States are perhaps the pinnacle of Enlightenment philosophy in action. They are works of genius, to be sure. They are not, however, particularly sound pieces of Christian doctrine. The supposedly divine rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (likely a purposeful misquote of Locke's "life, liberty, and estate") are in no way guaranteed in the New Testament. In fact, the Declaration's assertion that it is a natural right of man to "alter and abolish" any government destructive to these natural rights and "to institute a new government" seems a remarkable departure from the teaching of Paul in Romans 13 that we are to "to be subject to governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted from God." Jefferson was able to make such claims because his culture had, just as the hellenized church of the first century to whom John wrote, and just as we do today, inserted the philosophies of his own cultural context into his understanding of the nature of God. His ideas that these rights are natural, that authority comes from the people and not from God (as Paul claimed), and that it is a natural right to throw off a government comes as much from Locke, Hume, and Rousseau as it does from his reading of the New Testament. They hinge, once again, on an understanding of God as a distant creator, leaving mankind, who he has endowed with Reason, to his own devices.

While I'm actually kind of comfortable with the implications of this cosmology (though I don't think it's particularly correct), because it requires man to take responsibility for his own actions and control of his own destiny, I have often been under the impression that most of those I've heard asking God to return us to our founding principles would not be at all comfortable with such cosmology/theology. Instead, most of the people I hear repeating such prayers are from southern evangelical denominations who tend to believe in a God who is actively involved, not just in the large scale affairs of man through major but infrequent interventions (like the American Revolution), but in the day to day affairs of individual Christians. We (and by "we" I don't mean "me.") believe that we are called to certain professions, that there is a person chosen to be our spouse, that we can pray for God to open or close this or that door in order to guide our decisions. I happen to believe that reality splits the difference between these two extremes, and that God is intimately concerned with individuals and will, on occasion, intervene in our lives especially when we ask him to, but who is also content to be on an adventure with us. He gives me as much agency as he claims for himself. These three views of God are not the same and, in some ways, even compete, since living according to each may lead to very different behaviors.

So the question is, when we ask that God "return us to our Christian principles," which of these three competing Christianities are we asking for? If we are asking that we truly return to our Nation's founding principles, then we are asking for a view of God which posits him as a good, but distant sovereign who is content to let us live as we see fit. I don't think that this is what most of the people speaking this prayer have in mind. Instead, I suspect that they desire that God would intercede in the day to day operations of governments in order to guide our laws. This is absolutely not what our founders had in mind. Whenever one of us asks for a Christian Nation, I suspect that each of us is asking according to our own understanding of God and his proper relationship with the governance of a nation. And this is where such a prayer becomes problematic.

These different understandings of Christianity (which are, again, influenced by philosophy and cosmology), may not seem that different, but that is because they do not have the effect of civil law. What happens when we begin to base a system of law on one of them.  What happens to forms of Christianity that are not majority forms? That majority forms don't even consider Christianity. What happens when Methodists control government and outlaw the teaching of Baptism for the remission of sins? What happens to The LDS church when Baptists (who consider them a cult) take office? For that matter, what if we really did establish a "Christian" nation which, we should assume would mean that we based our laws on the teachings of Christ. Would we enshrine in law that citizens must sell all their possessions and give them to the poor? Would we, instead if imprisoning thieves, give them our coats instead? Although, for reasons not established here, this sounds pretty good to me, most of the people who speak such prayers would likely call this communism and say "the difference between Christianity and communism is that Christianity is a choice." But, of course, when Jesus spoke these things, he spoke them as commands. So which version of Christianity to we enshrine in our laws?

Such concerns are why our founders were genius enough to decree that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercising thereof," which is commonly understood as the separation of church and state. They understood that their understanding of the relationship between God and man (which, as we have seen, have little resemblance to the actual teachings of Christ, though it shares Christ's respect for individual people) is a great way to frame a nation, but not a particularly good way to run it.

Finally, I think it's completely appropriate that we pray for revival in our nation (and indeed in our world). I think we should pray that God will move in our communities, and that God will inspire and protect our leaders. Perhaps more importantly, we should not then stop at prayer, but we should go out and begin to produce change; we should do the work of revival. I think that, to a certain extent, our desire for a Christian Nation is a way to pass the buck. We make it the responsibility of the government to institute laws rather than taking on ourselves to teach a higher law. We desire prayer in schools while we fail to pray at home, and we wish for Bibles in schools while ours collect dust from Monday to Saturday. We want the ten commandments in front of our courthouses but not in our lives. We support political parties that protect the unborn but which also protect corporate greed, and when that party is installed, we somehow think that we have taken a step toward restoring our Christian roots.  So then, if we look around and we see that out culture is sick (it is) and dying (it is), it is not that our government has failed to retain its Christian roots; it is that we have. After all, our kingdom, which is not of this world, precedes and far exceeds the American Constitution.

I don't want pray for God to return our nation to its Christian roots, since they were never particularly Christian to start with. Instead, I pray that God will fully and firmly establish His own kingdom in his earth and that we His people will be his instruments.

Testing and College Preparation: What I Learned by Listening to My Students

As a side project in the final weeks of this semester, my Comp II students read and responded to Kenneth Bernstein's lately popular tour de force "A warning to college profs from a high school teacher." The piece, written on the occasion of Bernstein's retirement from teaching high school civics, first appeared in the journal Academe. The article entered the public conversation when it was reprinted for the Washington Post online column "The Answer Sheet." Bernstein, whose retirement happens to coincide with the entry of the first generation of students educated under No Child Left Behind into college, argues that the incessant standardized testing that has come with NCLB has created a generation of students who are unprepared for college. This is because, according to Bernstein, school curriculum from the third grade on is designed to help students pass the yearly tests. This type of pedagogy, which focuses on memorizable and repeatable material, test-taking strategies, and so on, dominates the curriculum, pushing out any pedagogies that inculcate the kinds of critical thinking and analysis expected in college.

This is not a new argument. Even if I think he's right (I do), I have to admit that these arguments are a little tired. Every generation, it seems, has a reason why the next generation is less prepared. So, though I think Bernstein is likely at least partly right, his argument smacks of the Myth of the Golden Age fallacy.  And these arguments are not uncommon. This argument is repeated by critics of NCLB, the new critics of Common Core, and (germane to my own research) by high school teachers convinced that the internet is destroying the English language (it's not, by the way). Such pronouncements that the sky is falling are common in the public conversations about education. What is not common in the public conversation are the actual views of the students effected by these policies. Now that the first of these students have finally reached college, the time is right to ask what they think about their own preparation.

This became the goal of the side project I am relating here. In order to give a voice to these students, my class read about the issue, responded in a couple of online discussion board posts, and finally hosted an open discussion to which we invited interested stake holder experts in the field including our writing director, English Department chair, the Vice President for Academic Affairs, and a professor from the education department who specializes in assessment. We also had guests from off campus including a former State Teacher of the Year who is now the program director of a non-profit that supports our state's largest urban school district. (We also invited a couple classroom teachers but, ironically, they were both busy proctoring standardized tests on the day we hosted our discussion). These experts were invited to participate, but primarily as passive audience members who were allowed to ask questions.

Our discussion came primarily from the issues that came up in our discussion board posts, which began with a fairly straightforward question: Bernstein argues that standardized testing under NCLB is the reason students are unprepared for college. So, did you feel unprepared for college? If so, in what ways? On the other hand, do you feel that you were in fact prepared and, if so, what kinds of things prepared you?

I was actually surprised at how many students reported that they did feel like they were prepared for college learning. Admittedly, there are a few of them whose writing caused me to question whether or not they are prepared as they think they are. But by and large, these are typical second semester students, no worse than those I taught when I first started teaching composition in 2007. What was also surprising to me was how few students mentioned testing, or even curriculum, in their posts. Certainly, some of the savvy students knew that these posts were in response to an article about testing, so their answers should probably mention this. But testing was never the center of their posts, and came up very rarely in the narratives we heard during our discussion. This was true both of students who reported feeling prepared and those that didn't.

Many reported that they felt unprepared for the kinds of writing they would do. Others mentioned being unprepared for the work load, having never really had to do substantial and substantive homework before. But most of these students felt that, overall, they were prepared and so these news ways of learning were a matter of adjustment. Those few who reported feeling completely unprepared did not blame testing, or even mention it. Instead, their narratives focused on a lack of support in the classroom. One student, who was raised in a military home, talked about how often he moved to new schools. Most of these schools, he says, were very poor. Teachers were dealing with large class sizes with few resources, where they were having to provide supplies for their classrooms. This led to situations in which the teachers were often over worked and burnt out, and he often felt that he was being left to his own devices to try to learn. Significantly, he never wrote an academic essay, even of the maligned five paragraph variety, until he got to college.

In contrast to his experiences, my students who reported feeling well prepared came almost exclusively from middle class, even wealthy, suburbs. When asked what made them feel prepared, a surprising number of them did not even mention curriculum. Instead, they talked occasionally about involved teachers, and many of them talked about their parents, often mentioning that they were expected to perform well. One student even explicitly stated that what he learned in the classroom had nothing to do with the fact that he feels prepared. For him, most of what is most difficult to adjust to in college does not relate to curriculum, but instead includes the life changes that come with college: getting used to work load, and working a part time job, and living away from home for the first time. For this reason, the people who most prepared him were his coaches and relatives who stressed work ethic and resilience.

Interestingly, these responses suggest that, at least in the eyes of our students, our ability to be successful in college has less to do with coursework than we might assume. Instead, those students who feel most prepared had positive and involved support systems including teachers, parents, coaches and others.

This probably shouldn't be so surprising. In literacy studies, we've known at least since Deborah Brandt began her grounded theory studies of literacy sponsorship that family support systems have far more to do with literate ability than in-school experiences. If this is true in all areas of learning, perhaps when we assess our students' success, we have to begin to look beyond connections between test scores, textbooks, and curriculum. When our schools are failing, perhaps our texts and lesson plans aren't the first place we should look. Perhaps we should figure out where these extracurricular influences are failing or missing, and find ways to intervene in these areas. Standardized tests tell us very little about these things. In fact, as others have argued, standardized tests may do even more harm to these students since tests tend to privilege the kinds of knowledge not available to children in marginalized communities, where these support systems are often most lacking.

Alternative Assessment:

So we may know that the kinds of things we learn about our students through testing them may not actually predict their preparedness for college, but the fact remains that we do need some way to assess our students. We have to find out what they are learning. It might be very trendy for us teachers to hate standardized testing and to talk about how damaging it is. But we are doing little good if we are not able to propose alternative methods of assessment.  With regard to this, we can learn here from our home schooled and private school students.

At the university where I teach, a midwestern Christian university representing a fairly conservative demographic, we have a healthy number of students who were not in public schools, but who were educated in private schools or were home schooled. Most of the students in my class who were educated at home or in private schools had never taken a standardized test except for the SAT and ACT college entrance exams. Yet, all of them are at least proficient. A couple of them are among my best students. So we may have much to learn by looking at the ways in which these students were assessed.

One young man reported that his schooling was very independent. He was often learning on his own, reading and completing home school curriculum. In order to assess his learning, his parents made him teach them the material he had been reading. This was, as it turns out, a bit problematic. He reports that his parents, who were not highly educated themselves, often knew less about his subjects than he did. So, he was responsible for his learning in a way that most educators would not be comfortable with. Certainly, his success has come in part through his own ability and self-motivation, but his parents' method of assessment, albeit possibly an accident of their own insufficiency, did some very important things. By having to relate to his parents what he had learned, he had to become conversant with the subject. He had to go beyond the ability to recognize the right answer on a multiple choice test. Insead, he had to achieve literacy of the subject in order to choose relevant knowledge, compress it into manageable parts, and relate it to another person in a communicative way.

Literacy of the subject matter was even more important for one young woman in my class, whose parents were much more purposeful in their assessment. This young woman reports that her parents required a great deal of writing in which she was expected to critically engage her subjects, writing in a way that showed her comprehension of each subject. Her mother's grade, which was not necessarily attached to quantifiable, objective measures (like a test), was assigned based on her mother's impression of how well she did in the subject over the course of the year. It was, in a sense, "made up." Yet, despite never taking a standardized test, and having been assigned grades by arguably dubious standards, she is one my my brightest composition students.

Bernstein's biggest critique of NCLB in general and standardized testing in particular is that tests cannot prepare students for the kinds of critical thinking expected of them in college. Because of this, we're invited to assume, strategies that prepare students for testing privilege thinking strategies that do not depend on critical thinking. Indeed, one of my students related that teachers were often teaching test-taking strategies, aimed at helping students figure out answers to questions they did not actually know. In this sense, and if this is common, a certain amount of public school curriculum focuses not on academic subjects at all, but on how to fool the tests.

What's striking about the forms of assessment more common for my home schooled and privately schooled students is that they don't just assess what a student has learned by testing their knowledge on a multiple choice test. Instead, their methods of assessment (critical essay writing, "teaching" the material) have pedagogical aims of their own. In relating what they had learned, these students also had to become conversant with the material, synthesize it, and construct arguments from and about it. In these models, assessment does double duty. It tests a students knowledge of their subjects while also teaching the skills, conventions, and ways of thinking privileged in college classes.

Certainly, these forms of assessment aren't quantitative, and thus don't necessarily carry the pretense of objectivity. But they are better. And so public school systems may have much to learn from these methods that might help us to develop forms of assessment that are more productive for our students.

The Rhetoric of My Office

This year, for the first time ever, I have my own office at the institution where I teach. Having to choose things to hang on the walls and deciding which books would need to come from home to sit on the bookshelf in my office was a new experience for me. So, as I added things over the course of the first semester, I became aware of just how conscious I was about the choices I was making (I don't know why that should have been surprising to me, but it was). Mainly, I was aware of how aware I was (meta-awareness?) about what these choices would communicate about me--my preferences, philosophies, and even my teaching style. My office is, as it turns out, a rhetorical device. This, I admit,  rather juvenile realization was re-enforced when a student came into my office for a conference, sat down on my hand-me-down love seat, looked around for a few seconds, and said, "I'm judging you by the things on your office." It is (and I told him so) appropriate for him to have done so. This is because my office communicates definite messages, some purposeful, some haphazard, about me as a teacher and as a person.

There are relatively obvious, and certainly purposeful messages being communicated through the things I've hung on the walls. I expected these things to be an expression of the way I see the world, the things I care about, and ultimately the ways that I wish to be viewed. These include Warhol themed nick-knacks like a calendar with a Warhol quote and Campbell's soup cans designed after the famous Warhol paintings (an interesting inversion in which the actual Campbell's soup brand drew inspiration from an artist who drew inspiration from their own graphic design). I added these art themed elements to go along with the one wall hanging in my office that I didn't go out and find, which was a poster print of a Kandinsky painting. I chose this poster out of a stack of things hanging around which had been abandoned by previous faculty. These things included a lot of classical themed stuff (Shakespeare stuff, mainly). I chose the Kandinsky piece because I prefer the modern over the classical, the pop over the cultured, the deconstructive over the refined. I added to these pieces a Dali style melting clock I bought at Hobby Lobby, so that my office is full of references to Modern art.

In addition to these, I hung a TOMS shoes flag (which the company smartly includes in the purchase of every pair, with a note encouraging buyers to take pictures with their flags in the exotic places where they where TOMS shoes. A bit of marketing brilliance). I also have a concert poster from a Cake concert, which is printed using vegetable based dyes on recycled paper, and which explicitly says so on the bottom of the poster, a Kurt Vonnegut themed piece of graphic art, and a poster sized copy of the mural at 826 Valencia, a youth literacy center in San Francisco. These all operate to give the office a sort of pseudo-hispster vibe which is in keeping with the way I see myself and wish to present myself--a hopefully unpretentious, socially aware hippy type guy, disguised in preppy clothes.

Of course, these things aren't very big and the office is actually, despite all these accoutrements, relatively sparse. I haven't changed the wall color, so the office is a drab, institutional off-white. The pictures on the wall are of relatively uniform size and are hung in a more or less straight line around the office, and I have, for a member of the English faculty, relatively few books on one rather cheap book shelf (which was already in the office when I moved in). I have only 45 of my own books in my office, all of them Comp/Rhet themed. This is compared to the many hundreds I have crowding our office at home. I also have a couple binders of research articles and some small books left on the shelf by a previous tenant. Though these decisions were not purposeful, they do communicate an understanding of my own position. I am contingent faculty, on contract for one semester at a time. Though the English department and I are happy with each other, and don't plan to break up any time soon, it is nevertheless possible that any one semester could be my last (especially since we keep getting our budget cut). And even if I remain on board, the university could hire a tenure track faculty member who needs the office, and so I could be shipped down the hall to share with another adjunct. So it would be rather presumptuous, and possibly a waste of time to pound too many holes in the walls or to haul too many books up the stairs. These decisions were not really purposeful, and so perhaps they're not strictly rhetorical, but there is a clear connection between these decisions and my own understanding of who I am. Thus, understanding my position provides a proper lens for understanding my decorating decisions.

This piece admittedly serves little particular purpose other than giving me something fun and interesting to think about. But it does provide an example that indeed there are many texts that can be analyzed outside of those we think of an technically and traditionally academic. Indeed, applying this type of analysis to other, larger forms of space commonly reveal important lessons about the politics of space, the symbology of urban/suburban design, and the assumptions that guide the way we live and move in our environments. These types of analysis, in short, teach us a great deal about ourselves.

Nike Celebrates [Under?]Achievement

We all know what sneaker commercials are like. A freakishly talented celebrity super human performs amazing feats of strength or skill, usually against either a minimalist silence or against an expensively produced, raucous rock song.  Time will likely be slowed so that we can appreciate the agility and poise of our Superman, as flash bulbs momentarily silhouette his amazing physique. Then, in close up, we see his shoes. And on the shoes, the swoosh, or the swish, or the basket pattern, or some other form of highly recognizable iconography. And maybe we're supposed to think, "it's gotta be the shoes that make him fly." Or maybe we're just supposed to see that he's wearing these shoes, so they must be the best.

We all know this commercial, because it's every commercial. Through these ads, companies exploit our own wish to be great by showing us those who truly are and then drawing connections between that greatness and their product. NIKE has been a master of these type of ads at least since the introduction of their Air Jordan line in 1985. A prescient example of this style is this early commercial for the Air Jordan I.

In this example, we see all the genre conventions that have come to typify sneaker ads (Spike Lee's internal rhymes and Looney Tunes character cameos have, thankfully, fallen out of favor). We see His Air-ness on an outdoor court, alone of course, like a tragic Greek hero. The soundtrack is silent, save for the sound of a jet engine, throttling up before take off. As the pitch of the engine rises, so too does Jordan, flying through the air in slow motion, assuming the pose that became the apparel line's universally recognizable logo. Finally, as he slams the ball through the hoop, we hear a thunderous echo, and we hear Jordan ask, "who says man was not meant to fly?"

The ad hardly talks about the product at all. We don't hear anything about how light the shoes are, how springy the heels, how solid the ankle support. Instead, we are shown only the very epitome of greatness, followed by the simple statement "Air Jordan. . ." NIKE sees no need to sell us the product based on its merits. They needed only to connect the shoe to Jordan's greatness (a connection Jordan was all too happy to help make. He was fined $5000 every time he wore the shoes in a game because they did not fit uniform standards. If he's willing to pay so much money to wear the shoes, they must be good.)

Because this strategy is so well known to us all, and because it is so tried and true, NIKE's 2011 "Find Your Greatness" campaign might be a bit of a surprise. This is because the "greatness" the ads in this campaign celebrate are nothing like the greatness that we would associate with a Michael Jordan (or even his counterfeit copy, LeBron James). The "Jogger" ad, which might have been the most memorable ad of the campaign, provides a good example of NIKE's much different kind of greatness.

This ad shares a few noticeable things with it's 26 year old predecessor. It's remarkably silent; we hear nothing but the sound of crickets at dusk and the crescendo of footfalls on asphalt. It features a human being in solitude. This seems to be the mark of discipline. The characters in these commercials are still out working, alone in their determination, while others have gone in.

And yet, there is one profound difference in these ads. As he gets closer to the camera, it's clear that the lonely character in the "Jogger" ad is not Michael Jordan, the world class athlete--the best to ever play his sport.  Rather, he is a morbidly obese fourteen year old from London, Ohio named Nathan. He runs awkwardly and sweats profusely, but he's catching up to the camera, which is also moving along the deserted road. And, as he runs, a voice proclaims that ". . .greatness is no more unique to us than breathing. We're all capable of it. All of us."

The brilliance of the ad is that it celebrates the un-athletic, the un-talented, the banal. What's more, it calls it "greatness." So, these ads present NIKE apparel, not as the apparel of the elite, winning championships and MVP trophies, but as the apparel of the kid, winning a battle against himself and against his own body. Greatness in these ads isn't the super-human talents of the superstar. Greatness is a kid having the courage to change the direction of his life, against all odds and against the doubt of others. This, perhaps ironically, makes the ad very powerful, because it celebrates the Everyman. It speaks to the consumer that doesn't want to be a superstar, but instead wants to be healthier, wants to live without being ashamed, wants a date to prom, and it says, "we've got the apparel to support that, to support whatever 'greatness' means to you."