Ferguson, Missouri and Leaving Academia

This is a piece that has waited nearly two years to be written, and even as I write it, I partially regret it, but it feels prophetic--a voice in the wilderness that needs to be heard.

 I'm a police officer. I'm also a teacher. I've had a foot in each of these identities my entire adult life. I wanted to teach at a university from the time I first arrived at university (before that, I wanted to teach high school). But after a year working as a professional actor, I decided that I did not want to teach theatre and that I would need a "real job" if I wanted to re-tool in graduate school. So I took the only other job I had ever wanted to do, and I became a police officer in the same medium-large city as my father. While I worked as an officer full time at night, I also earned a Master of Arts degree in English, worked two years toward a PhD in English Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy, and taught either as an adjunct or a graduate student for eight years. Two years ago, I took on more responsibility on my police department (and, full disclosure, a requisite increase in pay) and stepped away from the PhD, uncertain as to whether or not I would finish it, but certain that I would continue teaching. This August, the third academic year in which I have not taught will begin, and I will still not be teaching. What happened? Ferguson, Missouri.

A couple months after I stepped away from my PhD program, Michael Brown was shot and killed by Ferguson, MO police officer Darren Wilson. A version of events told by his friend held that Brown had been trying to surrender to Wilson, holding his hands in the air, when Officer Wilson murdered him in cold blood. This was aired in a television interview and immediately became the official version of events in the national media.

Around the same time, a hispanic man in a neighboring jurisdiction died after a video-taped confrontation with police, in which no weapons were involved. Two years later, two more high profile cases have again brought the issues that these incidents laid bare back into the public conversation. At the time I was asked often by friends, people at church, and my academy colleagues what I thought about these cases. I would say simply that I wasn't there; I'm not part of the investigation, and so it would be inappropriate and irresponsible for me to give an opinion at that time.

This is an attitude that, in large part, I held as an important academic habit. In fact, I saw this as an ethic that academics hold dear. My own discipline of Composition and Rhetoric preaches a thorough and sober approach to evidence. We have even coined a term for this: "negative capability," or a rhetor's ability to withhold judgement until she has examined all the evidence, weighed it against other evidence and context, questioned assumptions, biases, and motives of those providing the evidence and indeed the rhetor himself, and taken time to consider what all these mean.

Yet what I saw among many of my academic friends and colleagues was very much the opposite. It is not surprising to me that my colleagues would hold particular views on race and its role in structures like policing. After all, many academics in the humanities, myself included, hold fairly progressive ideas with respect to social issues. My own research involved the ways in which elements of the built environment act as signifiers of inclusion/exclusion (in other words, how the way we build stuff, the signs we post etc. are read by people to they belong in a place or whether they don't). What did surprise me was their extraordinary rush to believe and act on a version of events from a spurious source given long before any other evidence was even available. Incidentally, in the two years since Ferguson, I have read both DOJ investigations (Darren Wilson and the Ferguson Police Department were investigated separately), and I am convinced that 1) Wilson was legally justified in shooting Brown and that 2) the people of Ferguson were absolutely reasonable in believing Brown's friend instead of "their" horribly malfunctioning police department. I do not extend this priviledge to professional academics whose job it is to wait for, then carefully weigh evidence (two years later, this is the first time I've given a public opinion on the incident).

I saw from my colleagues in academe countless critiques against the police, accusations that American police are racist and violent, part of abhorrent system of control, out of control themselves, and so on. I saw none of the things I had come to expect of my own field of Rhetoric. I saw no discussion of the mediators involved in video evidence--the role of camera angle, the role of the videographer and her decisions about when to start and stop filming, of what to include in the frame and exclude out of it, the role of the news editor in determining where to cut the video and whether or not to include sound, and whose commentary will be included, whether that commentary will come before or after the video, etc. I saw no attempt to interrogate the market system at play in media coverage of the event-- no question as to whether or not wealthy white owners of cable news networks may have something to gain through editorial choices that posit middle class, white police officers as murderers of poor black youths. Instead, I saw shouting in university courtyards, vicious name-calling, rushes to judgement, and a complete lack of respect for actual evidence. Certainly, as is the case in examining any community, it would not be fair to lump all academics into one box. There were people, usually close friends, who would ask me about my perspective as a police officer and had tremendous respect for whatever insights I had (evasive and tentative as they often were). There were probably many others whose prudence kept them out of the public conversation all together and so I never knew about them. But I didn't see them, not even to urge calm and deliberation, which is what I always felt we were supposed to do.

After the in-custody death in our neighboring jurisdiction, while the investigation was still on-going, a community literacy center with whom I had worked for several months held a writing workshop for the family and friends of the subject (I don't mind calling him victim) to write about what the experience was like for them. On the same day that my former colleagues were posting pictures of themselves with smiling members of the victim's family, we were assigning officers to sit on the home of one of the involved officers who lived in our jurisdiction, because he was receiving death threats serious enough that we deemed it necessary to post a guard on his house, something that usually only happens in the movies. That officer was, supposedly, under an open investigation and thus enjoyed, supposedly, the legal presumption of innocence. I am not aware that any writing workshop was ever considered for the officer, his coworkers, or his family (maybe there was and I never knew, but  I would have been the natural person to contact to facilitate it, so I feel safe in assuming there was none). No one ever gave him the opportunity to write about what it was like to go from being afraid he was going to die, to being afraid he was going to be prosecuted, to being afraid he was going to die again. No one gave his wife and children an opportunity to write about what it was like to have their father vilified in the public forum--to hear that he should go to prison forever, that he should be killed. No one asked them to describe what it's like not to be allowed to go outside to play because there have been threats against your family. There was no attempt by my colleagues at the writing center, that I know of, to understand a fuller picture of those effected, or even acknowledge, despite having worked with me for months, that there was one. Instead, that officer, a husband, father, and public servant, was relegated to the position of robot-police machine, inhuman and inhumane instrument of a racist and evil system, that which all right-minded, socially progressive academics must stand against, then publish research about.

I had always seen my field as a last vestige of hope in a society that rewards rushing to the extremes (take, for instance, the people we've chosen as our presidential nominees). As teachers in universities, we were perhaps American society's last best hope to finally learn slow and respectful discourse on important topics--topics that involve the lives of police officers and of minorities, topics which deserve serious and deliberative discourse. Yet the speech and activities of my colleagues after Ferguson made me question if we had ever actually believed any of the things we had been teaching our students all along. Maybe we never actually meant it.

Policing is very imperfect. If not carefully managed, it can have dehumanizing effects, both on officers and the people with whom they interact. Officers, if they are not careful, can easily develop very myopic views of the the world, views which they fully believe are the only "real" world that only they are in a position to see. Police officers can fall prey easily to black and white views of their communities: us and them, good people and bad people, criminals and victims, and yes, even sometimes, black and white. These tendencies must be examined and we have the obligation to determine what role these tendencies play in incidents like those in Ferguson (and these similar incidents since), and what we can do about them. But the profession of policing is dominated by people who truly believe in and orient their professional lives toward service. As problematic as this type of dualistic thinking can be, police officers overwhelmingly believe that good people need to be protected from bad people, and that this mission is worth risking our own lives. This is evident in the personal and professional sacrifices police officers make every day.

My wife and children are without me every night that I work, so that my wife and I have slept in the same bed at the same time less than half the days we've been married. I am 37 years old and I have arthritis in my right hip, where my gun presses into my side. I know what it's like to be bitten by a human and spend the next year having routine blood tests for blood borne pathogens. I know what human brain matter looks like on a popcorn ceiling. I know what it's like to tell an African American man, a father like me, that his 17 year old daughter was killed by a stray bullet at a New Year's party, while at the same time a 30 year old Syracuse PhD candidate is publishing a paper claiming that I can't empathize with that man because I don't live in his neighborhood (a real paper, by the way, given at CCCC, 2014).

We keep doing it despite these sacrifices and despite the inherent danger not because we were picked on in high school and we want to get back at the world, or because we want to subjugate minorities and trap them in their lower class neighborhoods, or because we just like the power trip, or any of the other things we are accused of every day. We do it because we believe in it. Imperfect as we are, we believe deeply in the perfection of our cause.

I'm left to wonder now what we, as academics believe. How did our reaction to Ferguson and similar incidents seem to betray the habits that I thought we most valued, the ethics that drew me to the field in the first place. Perhaps I am being too critical of academe. Perhaps it is well-meaning enough. Maybe we already knew what we believed, and so we thought we must speak out quickly because the value of human life trumps the academic, theoretical value of "negative capability." Maybe we made the very human error of failing to question our own biases when reacting to Ferguson, even as we teach students to carefully examine their own. Maybe we have such firm beliefs about systems in general that we failed to examine the particulars of these individual cases, instead prematurely assuming that the individual case was simply one more example of the problem of the system as a whole. Maybe we still hold our academic values firmly, we just forgot them a little in the heat of the very important moment.

But as any recently disillusioned person, I can't help but see something more insidious. Maybe, when Ferguson happened, what we saw was a bandwagon. Aboard that bandwagon we saw ready-made kairotic research questions, publishing opportunities, entryways for our literacy centers into communities usually reluctant to trust egg-heads with clipboards. Maybe it was nothing more than  careerism, and completely unreflective exploitation of my life as an officer and the lives of the minorities in the communities I serve.

I love the university. I love teaching, and I miss it often. And I hesitated to write these words for nearly two years because I wish to reserve the right to change my mind, but at the moment I cannot see myself returning to the classroom. Ferguson, Missouri forced me to confront these two roles I play: as an academic and as a police officer. I'm not the kind of person who feels an obligation to "choose sides." I am deeply suspicious of anything that feels like "us versus them," but my experiences watching, talking to, arguing with these two separate communities in which I'm wholly a member has forced me to confront what I believe.

I believe that, despite deep imperfections, perhaps even tragic ones, in American policing, the men and women I serve alongside do it because we believe in what we're trying to do. We hold these beliefs strongly enough to risk our lives for them.

As an academic, I'm not entirely sure we actually believe anything.

What are Students Thinking? -- Quoting the Dictionary

See the explanation of the "What are Students Thinking" post series, where I explain what these posts are about and what they are for.

For this first "What are Students Thinking" post, I'm considering why students quote dictionaries. This is one of those freshmen cliches that all teachers of first year writing know and abhor. Composition theorists have mentioned this problem in discussions of the positivist views of language many students hold. Our students, like many people outside of English departments, have an understanding of  language as fixed and definite. To them, words have explicit, singular meanings, and these meanings may be found in dictionaries. Dictionaries, to our students, are catalogues of the factual, unassailable, exact and, correct meanings of particular words. There is, for them, a naturalized understanding of the way words work, as if their meanings come from God, who directly inspired the prophet Webster.

When I talk about definition arguments with my students, I begin by foregrounding where definitions come from. Most students have never considered that dictionaries are actually written by people. Thus, definitions are, after all, the opinions of a collection of human authors and their editors. To demonstrate this, I like to show students definitions from Samuel Johnson's dictionary, which includes such gems as:

oats: a grain, which in England is fed to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.

Centuries removed from Dr. Johnson's dictionary, we can see the very obvious class structure implied in this definition. Yet we take our own modern dictionaries as purely un-ideological repositories of linguistic truth. We don't register (or even know about) the political aims of Noah Webster's spelling reforms, undertaken in order to differentiate (read: un-Frenchify) American English. Instead, these definitions are taken to be givens.

For our students, this means that a dictionary definition gives them solid ground. After all, in asking students to write argumentative papers, we are forcing them to confront the continent nature of the conversations they join. They're finding out that truth is not as solid as they've perhaps been made to believe. The very process of argument emphasizes this. We all make contributions to a conversation, and no one is quite right, and maybe no one is quite wrong either. This is disconcerting, especially for students who just want the right answer, the one that's going to get them a good grade.

A dictionary definition, then, is at least one unassailable truth, a thing that cannot be attacked. A word, at least, is what it is and no one can count off because they disagree with it.

But even in the argument of definition papers I assign, where the continent, unsettled nature of particular terms and concepts is actually the point, I see these dictionary definitions cropping up. In fact, in the unit my classes are finishing up, we emphasized the continent nature of words, and talked about the histories of these dictionaries in order to denaturalize my students' views of language.

I even went so far as to just flat tell them, "you should not quote the dictionary in your papers for all the reasons we've been talking about." After all, the whole point was for them to build their own definitions and argue for their legitimacy.

Yet when the first drafts came in, I found dictionary definition after dictionary definition. What gives? Did students not believe any of the things I'd said about where these definitions come from? Did they just flat fail to listen? This seems like a pessimistic view of my impressively involved students. As I said in the intro to this series, I'm much more interested in the rhetorical choices students are making when they fail to meet expectations, especially those I've made pretty explicit. Students know that these definitions are not solid facts, but rater opinions. They know that the point of this assignment is to make definitions on our own. So why would they, nevertheless, default to these dictionary definitions?

A few of them actually cited the definition in order to problematize it. They quoted the definition then went on to write about how deficient the definition, and this culture's understanding of the concept, actually are. This is actually a fairly sophisticated use of these definitions. If I react only to the fact that the broke my "rule" against quoting dictionaries, I fail to give them credit for doing something that is actually quite advanced. Instead, maybe I have to consider such moves as a fair exception to my rule. But what of students who make the more typical move of using the definitions as the final authority?

Nancy Sommers, David Bartholomae and others have written about the difficulty in helping students to develop a sense of agency and authority in their writing. One of our tasks as first year writing teachers is to enculturate students into the expert world of academe. Part of our job is to help them sound like experts, even before they really are. But our students seem have a great deal of apprehension about this. After all, their role in education has always been as receptors of knowledge--vessels into which knowledge is poured by teachers who are assumed to know more than them.

The kinds of writing most of them have done before coming to college illustrate this. Before coming to college, students spend a great deal of time writing book report in which their goal is to prove they've read the book, essay tests where their goal is to show they've internalized the course material so that they have become conversant with it, and other such performative writing tasks. So, even in their writing, their goal has always been to show that they have learned other people's knowledge.

Yet, what we are asking them to do is to contribute knowledge--to create it. In asking them to formulate definitional arguments, I am asking them to assume the role of the expert. Students seem reluctant to do this. Again, their role has always been to learn from the experts, not to be them. Asking them to become experts has disoriented them. It may even feel presumptuous to them to assume such a role. They respond by defaulting to someone else's expertise, as if to say "I may pose my definition, but at the end, I'd better provide the real definition by the real expert."

So how do I counter this? How do I encourage students to assume their own agency and expertise? How do I convince them that their definitions are as valid as those written by interns and editors at Webster's, and are in fact probably better (because they haven't been simplified into one sentence).  These are open questions, but answers that we cannot arrive at unless we ask better questions than "weren't you listening when I said not to quote the dictionary?"

What are Students Thinking?

Writing teachers are full of pet peeves. This is perhaps inevitable since every time we experience writing habits we find distasteful, we do so while grading a huge stack of papers. This means that we experience these over and over so that it seems like language is infested with these things. The common response of many who teach writing is simply to complain a lot. We create lists of freshman cliches, which we share with one another or sometimes with students (I once had one such list designed to help students find these in their own writing. It was tellingly entitled "Ugh Words"). We create elaborate jokes, send terrible students sentences back and forth to each other, and create snarky internet memes (ironically, about the terrible things the internet is supposed to be doing to student writing). I myself have written a series of five-pararaph essays about why the five-paragraph essay is so bad.

What we often forget to do, to our own shame, is to try to figure out why students do these things. Perhaps this is because we assume that these problems in our students' writing exhibit some kind of natural deficiency in their processes, work ethic, or with the students themselves. In other words, we assume that the problem is with our students, and not with our ability to teach them. Students have these problems because they are lazy, waiting until the night before the paper is due without time to really revise or evaluate their own writing, because they simply aren't listening to us in class when we tell them what [not] to do, or because they just don't care that much.

I, on the other hand, prefer to eschew utterly pessimistic views of our students and the work they do, mainly because such views are not particularly helpful with regard to my own teaching. It is, instead, much more helpful to look at these common problems in our students' writing, not as natural deficiencies or personal attacks against me personally, but as rhetorical choices our students make. In other words, when these students go awry, what were they trying to do, why did it fail, and how do we help them do what they were trying to do in more acceptable ways.

With that in mind, I'm beginning a new segment of this blog that deals especially with these peevish problems in student writing with the goal of theorizing what students are doing when they make common mistakes, or rather, when they write in ways which seem totally acceptable and appropriate to them, but which we hate. Assuming that students aren't doing these things because they hate me and wish to attack me, or because they are idiots who can't be helped, or because the golden age of my university years has given way to the incoherence of net-speak, the goal of this series will be to try to develop our own pedagogies so that we may respond to these problems in ways that are optimistic and constructive.

The first is already in the hopper; it will deal with students who quote dictionaries, and it will drop later tonight or tomorrow. So be watching for it. Now, I'm off to eat tacos.

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.

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."

Looks Like Mad: Imagery and Mediation

Last week, at a training class for public officials I attended, someone brought a newspaper which had a montage of four pictures (like the one above) of James Holmes, the accused gunman in the Aurora, CO movie theater massacre. Holmes's appearance in court had been the conversation du jour for the twenty-four hours or so before. The descriptions from the media of these images and video clips included words like "strange," "detached," "bizarre," and so on. These reports seemed to lead inevitably to speculation about whether or not these images suggested that Holmes was mentally insane or if he was, perhaps, acting in order to prepare for an insanity defense.

During a break in our class, one of my fellow attendees showed me the front page, pointed out the photos, and said something like, "look at him. Do you think he's crazy?" Always one for pedantry, I said "well, I think that the editors of this paper were able to choose four photos that made him look crazy." I then added, "I think these photos say more about how the editors wish for us to see Holmes than they do about Holmes himself." I don't intend to argue about whether or not Holmes is mentally ill (to tell you the truth, I don't watch the news much and don't have any interest in engaging in those kinds of discussions anyway), but rather I want to use the conversation to discuss the reliance on  imagery as evidence, and to interrogate it a bit.

What's interesting to me about the discussion in my training class, and with similar discussions in the media, is that we (viewers/discussants) were being asked to decide whether or not Holmes was mentally ill based on the evidence of how he "looks" in photos selected for us by editors, rather than on the immensely anti-social nature of the crimes of which he's accused. Our impressions about the way he "looks" seems to carry more rhetorical weight with regard to the question of his sanity than does his actual behavior.In a way, we were being asked whether or not the way he looks might serve to explain, or even excuse the way he actually behaved.

For me, this is a testament to the power of visual evidence on our culture. We readily assume that visual evidence, in the form of photographs and especially in the form of video, is an unimpeachable and unmediated form of proof. After all, if we can see something, we can assess it's truth ourselves. If one wanted to prove a particular person broke into a store, for instance, a copy of the surveillance tape settles is. We know the actions of police in the Rodney King assault were abusive because we saw the assault on tape. And with the proliferation of cameras in modern public space in the forms of camcorders, media crews, police car dash cams, traffic light cameras, surveillance cameras, and cell phones, we have been acculturated  into the understanding that anything can be recorded, and recordings tell us the truth. Seeing is, as we say, believing.

We, therefore, tend to accept visual proof of any concept, event, or phenomenon as unmediated truth. Thus, we fail to interrogate visual imagery in any significant way (except maybe to argue about whether or not an image was staged or Photoshopped). We must learn to be careful, though, when considering visual evidence, just as we would be with any other kind of evidence. We must learn to ask who recorded this image. What was their purpose in doing so; what did they include and what might they have left out; how was it edited and why was it edited this way; what is the context of this image? These kinds of questions help us to determine just what a visual image is actually evidence of. They allow us to determine how much of the truth a visual image actually shows us. It is not enough simply accept that, because we see an image, we are privy to the whole truth of any situation.

One of the readers I have used to teach composition contains an interview by textbook authors David Rosenwasser, and Jill Stephen with photographer Joseph Elliott. In this interview, Elliott makes reference to a distinction he makes between artistic photographers as "Stagers and Recorders." Recorders, like Andreas Gursky, attempt to capture reality as they see it in front of them. Their photographs are somewhat journalistic--one might say "slice of life." Stagers, such as Gregory Crewdson on the other hand, well, stage their photographs. They plan them ahead, set lighting, build sets, use posing actors, and so on.

Stagers, according to Elliott, see themselves as "more honest" than Recorders because they are willing to show their hand in their photographs. Elliott explains, "any photographer is clearly implicated by the process of taking photographs." He goes on to say, "a photographer is inevitably selecting what to shoot and thus what not to shoot, and he or she is always framing the shot in various ways." In other words, the photographer necessarily acts as a mediator between the subject and the viewer, simply by choosing what to photograph. For instance, in the examples I've provided in the hyperlinks above, Crewdson's photographs are obviously staged in order to capture his artistic vision. But even Gursky, a Recorder, has framed the photo in order to capture a certain geometry, chosen a time of day that best suited the lighting he wished to capture, chose from some number of prints that which best fit his aesthetic sense of composition, and so on. So, though his photo may provide a "slice of life," it is necessarily a carefully chosen slice.

This concept has application when considering non-artistic images (those which we may use as evidence) as well. A newspaper photographer, a crime scene detective, or a cell phone user photographing a police officer on a traffic stop all, like an photographer/artist, chooses what to photograph, and by necessary extension, what not to photograph. There is always something going on in the margins, outside the frame. The photographer is always deciding that this is the thing he wants to photograph, and this is when. Even the most objective photographer is choosing what to photograph and when to snap the shutter, and in this way mediates the "truth" that the image captures.

This holds true of video as well. This is an important point because we give video an even greater evidentiary weight than we do still images. After all, videos are real time. If I want to test whether or not the photo editor who put together the four photos of James Holmes had fairly represented his demeanor for the whole of his court appearance, I might watch watch the video of the entire proceeding.

But in video, as in still photos, mediation occurs simply in the act of pointing the camera alone. Then, the act of editing the video adds another very important level of mediation. For instance, look at the effect editing had on the video below.

This is a very chilling example of the ways in which editors of video can more or less create truth that may or may not fairly represent the "reality" that the camera filmed. Of course, most camera operators and editors are not so unfair as the editor of this video, but the process of mediation remains the same even when editors truly wish to present images fairly. She still must edit a video based on what she believes is important, based on how she interprets the event.

Even an unedited video is subject to the limitations of framing, camera angle, video quality and so on. For instance, the cameras from a police dash cam might lead to an entirely different understanding of an event when viewed from one camera angle than when viewed from another. What if you were asked to decide whether or not the shooting filmed in these hyperlinks was justified based on the first video alone? You would believe you had seen the event as it really unfolded. After all, you saw it happen--from the officers own camera. The first video seems to clearly show officers shooting a man who was simply walking away. But of course, when you watch the second video, the limitation of the first becomes clear.

It is, therefore, important when judging the value of an image to ask why this photographer took this particular image at this particular time and in this particular way. Was this taken by a journalist who wishes to sell copies? An advocate of some particular cause hoping to make a certain emotional impression? Might this photographer have left something out, and if so, what and to what effect? What context might we be missing when viewing the images alone?

By positing these questions, I don't mean to turn readers into conspiracy theorists, assuming that photographers are trying to trick us. The point is that all photographers, videographers, and editors must make decisions about what the viewer will see and how they will see it, simply by the limited nature of what they are able to show. Furthermore, the choices choices are rhetorical. They take specific images, at specific times, and for specific reasons. An image is not an unmediated and inherently subjective window into truth, but rather a limited and controlled argument. Visual images are certainly very powerful pieces of evidence, but they must be treated as what they are--pieces.

Remember this next time you're presented with an image that is said to be indisputable truth of something.

Digital Divide and Public Outcry

This photo by Rusty Costanza appeared on the front page of the Times-Picayune on July 17th, accompanying an article about a hotel implosion and concerns by residents of the nearby Iberville housing project that particulate dust from the implosion might be hazardous. Interestingly, when readers called and e-mailed author Katy Reckdahl to complain, it wasn't about the implosion itself, but about the photograph. Readers were outraged that the eight year old child in this photograph was playing with an iPad, an expensive "luxury" item. The response was enough that Times columnist Jarvis DeBerry wrote about the outcry days later. His column sparked more debate on the issue, as commenters and commentators began to argue about what people on government assistance should be allowed to possess, presumably on the public dime. His column, as I write this, has 451 online comments in addition to the phone calls and e-mails that spurred the column in the first place. The issue has also gained the attention of more serious writers, academics, and think tanks.

The predominant debate has been whether or not people who are poor deserve to have things that are not necessities (an issue handled quite well by Jane Devin, whose blog led me to this story in the first place). While I think that, at the heart of this debate, is the feeling that many in the middle class seem to hold that, because they they foot the bill for those on subsidized food/housing, they exert a "sense of ownership" (Baker) over them, or at least over their activities. After all, if it's my money that they are using, I should have a say in how they spend it. Of course, as Devin points out, this sense of ownership and control seems only to extend to poor beneficiaries of government assistance but not the wealthy (if I buy a Chevy tonight, I still expect to pay for it, despite the fact that "my" tax dollars saved the company). Many in the middle class, then, seem to have what Devin calls "a kind of backwards jealousy," toward the poor. Though they may live in 800 square foot apartments in often dangerous and neglected housing projects, they didn't have to pay [much] for them. Meanwhile, I've had to pay for every bit of my 1700 square foot house. (That is to say, I'm slowly paying back a mortgage company who trusted me enough to buy a house for me, in no small part because I have a job, for which I am qualified by way of an expensive education paid for by federally subsidized loans, offered to me because Sallie Mae trusted the co-signature of my solidly middle class hard working parents.) Certainly, I shouldn't see these people "playing" with "luxury" items bought with "my" money.

But of course, we're not talking about "fancy rims," or "gold teeth," or "Air Jordans," (DeBerry). Instead, the luxury item held by a child (who, I guess, we think is supposed to be working to earn it) is a powerful literacy tool. As DeBerry explains:

The sight of a kid in public housing with an iPad doesn't offend me. Actually it gives me hope. So many poor people have no access to the digital world. They fall behind in school because of it. They miss the opportunity to apply for certain jobs. Yes an iPad is an expensive gadget, but we can't deny its usefulness. As computers go, an iPad comes cheaper than most laptops and desktops.

Most of us in the middle class would not, even for a moment, consider the digital divices in our own lives to be unnecessary luxuries. After all, we balance our checking account online, and pay bills online. our cell phones have replaced our landlines and are thus our basic tool of communication. We use our household computers, laptops, or tablets for work, for school, and for important social interactions.
 
In my household, which consists of two adults and two toddlers, we have four laptop computers (only one of which is currently functioning), two smart phones (each of which is more powerful than my family's first DOS based 286), and an e-reader. And that's not even all. I have two jobs, one with city government and one with a private university. Each of these employers has issued me a laptop computer, and provides me with access to desktop computers in several locations.
 
It is, therefore, not a stretch to say that computers are, in fact, an indispensable part of modern life. Certainly, computer technology and the literacies attached to it, are necessary for anyone who is to compete for good jobs--the kind of jobs that allow for upward mobility-- in Information Age America. Beyond this, Palfrey and Gasser (and many others) have stressed the importance of digital communities to those born after about 1980. Indeed, for this generation, computer mediated communication is an important part of identity formation. In other words, with regard to both our professional and personal lives, computer technology is extremely important.
 
With this in mind, arguments that the poor do not deserve and should not have access to what are, for the rest of us, indispensable technologies are especially insidious. In an age when many of our most important and influential literacy tools have shifted to digital media, such an argument is like claiming that children in underperforming inner-city schools ought not have access to books.
 
The assumptions behind such a claim are frightening. If I'm giving the people who make such an argument the benefit of the doubt, I will suspect that they are not thinking of the iPad as a powerful literacy tool, but are probably assuming that it is being used primarily as a gaming device, or social networking tool (which may in fact say much their own habits). These arguers may simply be ignorant about issues of literacy and digital access. Cartainly, many people have not accepted that anything beyond what they got in the golden age of their education is necessary for learning (we didn't have all that in my day, and I turned out okay). They may not purposefully be saying that poor children shouldn't have the opportunities that their own children have.
 
On the other hand, Sam Fulwood, a senior fellow at the American Center for Progress argues that:

Anyone alarmed by the sight of that photo surely must believe the poor aren’t deserving of anything save the barest of survival necessities—if that much. What else could explain their anger at the sight of an 8-year-old black boy learning about a world beyond his immediate community with an iPad in his hands?

Certainly, these arguments seem to involve the assumption that those living off of government assistance deserve only the bare minimum: tattered books in inner-city schools, limited and timed access via computers in public libraries, and absolutely no frivolous computer games or social media use. If these are indeed the assumptions of these arguments, then as Courtney Baker suggests "This thinking. . .mistakes education and technology as solely the domain of the entitled."

Certainly, there is a whole history of literacy education that suggests that those in privileged positions (often those who are only tenuously in these positions) tend to block the access of those in classes below them from literacy tools. It is as if there is an instinct among the middle classes to protect itself from those that would be their competition if they were afforded the same educational opportunities.

For me, this idea opens up new research questions: To what extent might this actually be happening today? Are there those who, whether knowingly or not, actively work to maintain the digital divide? Certainly, there are many who benefit from this access gap. These beneficiaries without a doubt have an interest in maintaining the status quo. So, to what extent, if any, does public policy reflect a desire of the middle class (which makes up the bulk of the voting public) to maintain and benefit from the digital divide?

Being Really Useful: A (sort-of) tongue-in-cheek analysis of the Thomas and Friends series

As a father of twin sons, I have been subjected to hours upon hours of Thomas and Friends episodes. My sons also have Thomas the Tank Engine models (two of which actually propel themselves and pull wooden train cars), and Thomas blankets. In fact, my wife discovered a potty training breakthrough for our son Beckett by buying him Thomas underwear. She explained to him, "Thomas is our friend. We don't pee on our friends." After this, Beckett, who is innately logical, tried very hard not to wet his pants and, when he had an accident, he would sulk and say "we don't pee on our friends."

Their Thomas craze has subsided some in favor of Veggie Tales and Elmo, but during the height of their Thomas fandom, when we were watching the show constantly, I would make fun of the oft repeated phrase "really useful engine," a phrase repeated ad nauseam in the Thomas and Friends series. I, somewhat jokingly, insisted that the show was designed to brain-wash children into accepting the ethos of being "really useful" as sacrosanct. Of course, I made these assertions in jest, mostly because there is nothing so particularly insidious about teaching children to be useful.

Then, yesterday, I was picking up the horrifying mess my boys hourly make when I came across their "Thomas & His Friends Help Out" DVD. While I walked the DVD back to the living room (I found it in the bathroom, of course), I haphazardly read the back of the sleeve. The description of the stories contains a quote ascribed to the railway director, Sir Topham Hatt: "Helping out is one of the best ways to show that you're a Really Useful Engine." I instantly noticed the divine capitalization used in the phrase Really Useful Engine. This capitalization, usually reserved in modern English for proper nouns and pronouns for the deity, suggests that the ethos of being Really Useful is, in a very interesting way, treated as sacred within the context of these stories. Since this is the case, I thought, perhaps this ethic deserves a little attention. What does is mean to be Really Useful? What makes this ethos culturally appropriate, and what cultural systems does it privilege?

It may be tempting to think it silly to analyze a children's television program, that it is, on it's face, an over analysis, a pedantic intellectual exercise. I admit that this is true. I am, in fact, writing this blog mostly in jest. But, I would also argue that our children's television shows are indeed worthy of scholarly analysis. This is because, considering how much time our children spend watching television, educational and otherwise, it's reasonable to argue that these shows are one of the important activities through which we enculturate our children. In a way that probably ought to make us uncomfortable, it makes perfect sense that the nation that produced the ghastly Struwwelpeter stories also produced the Holocaust (see Katz, Steven B. "The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust." College English 54.3. 1992). This is because a society's cultural productions, especially those considered didactic, inculcate its members into the society's organization, ethics, and systems. So, what ethics and what systems are being privileged when we teach our children that it's important to be "Really Useful Engines?"

First of all, understand that within the context of the Thomas the Tank Engine TV shows (I confess, I haven't looked at the books, so I cannot speak for them), the goal of every character is to be regarded as "Really Useful," especially by Sir Topham Hatt, the Director of the Railroad. It is indeed, their only form of payment. The phrase "Really Useful" appears in nearly every episode and is, in fact, part of the theme song of the show. An engine becomes Really Useful in the ways one might expect: by being on-time, by working hard, and by performing well at difficult, work-centered tasks.

This is a decidedly industrial ethic. Work hard, and you shall be regarded as Really Useful. And, of course, to be called Really Useful is the ultimate compliment in these stories. Thomas and Friends, then, privileges an ethos that is undoubtedly industrial rather than, say, one that is relational. In the quote I gave from Topham Hatt earlier in this post, the reader may notice that one "help[s] out" (relational) in order to show that we are "Really Useful" (industrial). This quote, which succinctly provides the moral of these stories, seems to privilege the industrial over the relational. We do the work of relationship (helping out) in order to become industrious (really useful). The relational serves the purposes of the industrial, rather than the other way around.

This seems to fit well with cultural ethic of the industrialized west, specifically the UK and the US where these shows are produced. In many eastern cultures (especially middle-eastern), which are more relational, one might expect an inversion of this moral. One tries to be "really useful" (industrious) in order to "help out" (foster relationships and cohesion). In the west, we tend to privilege industriousness in an extraordinary way. We place great personal value on industrial value. That is to say, we often judge others by their ability to contribute through work. We introduce ourselves to strangers by telling them what we "do," which always means what we do to make money. Indeed, a good puritan work ethic is part of the fabric of our society, a society that counts on its members' ability and willingness to work. Industriousness is an important ethic with regard to the the maintenance of the military-industrial complex, which is, after all, the core of a capitalist society.

What we learn from this (which will not really be a surprise) is that we begin inculcating cultural values at a very early age,a and through seemingly innocuous, even wholesome, media. As an individualistic, capitalist society, we teach our children from a very early age the importance of individual achievement and industriousness. We want them to want to be Really Useful, because our society requires useful members--that is, members who do good work. If these lessons aren't exactly purposeful (I abjure the thought that Reverend Awdry was purposefully brainwashing children into good little corporate slaves) it is only because these ethics are so naturalized that these lessons happen automatically any time we write something we believe to be educational. These lessons just seem seem right and good in and of themselves. The ethics they teach are, for better or worse, sacrosanct.

I hope you've found this analysis Really Useful. Even better if you're a publisher who finds it industrious.

Ron Artest and the Language of [non]Apology

Yesterday, perennial basketball villain and recidivist Ron Artest (who I refuse to call Metta World Peace) made the bad kind of news again with his flagrant foul against OKC Thunder guard James Harden, a vicious and unprovoked elbow to the head of a player not even involved in the play. Artest, who has attempted to change his image in part with a ridiculous name change, issued a pretty shallow apology in the locker room. He's also offered some further apologies/excuses via twitter since the incident (how people apologize in 140 characters or less is a subject worthy of study in its own right).

As a language and rhetoric person, I find Artest's apology, as a discursive act, very interesting. As a Thunder fan and Artest hater, I find it rather hollow. Here is the apology:

During that play, you know, I just dunked on, you know, Durant and Ibaka, and I got real emotional, real excited and it was unfortunate that James, you know, had to get hit, you know, with an unintentional elbow. And I hope he’s okay, you know. The thunder, they’re playing for a championship this year, you know, so I really hope that he’s okay. And, you know, I apologize to the Thuder, you know, and to James Harden. It was such a great game, and it was unfortunate, you know. So much emotion was going, going on at that time so. . .That’s it for today [smiles, apparently having been directed not to answer any questions].

There are some interesting rhetorical moves imbedded in this statement--moves which rather remind me of the spontaneous utterances (a legal term) offered by people I've arrested as a police officer. Here's what I notice.

1) "I got real emotional, real excited."
Here, Artest offers the excuse for his actions. His implicit argument here is that the incident was simply an expression of Artest's emotions, which are of course universal and involuntary human reactions. Again, this mirrors the excuses offered up by many who have just committed crimes who wish to minimize their culpability by blaming their own emotions with statements like "he was talking noise and I just lost control." I'd be interested in a study of such use of emotion as excuse is a feature in the language of apologies in other cultures. I have a sense that such moves are made possible by our culture's privileging of emotion.

Our culture views emotion as central to decision making, and in fact we assume that such a view is natural common sense. We base our decisions about who to marry (and divorce) on how we "feel" about another person. We judge whether or not we are in the right career based on how the job makes us "feel," and we assume that the "right" job carries with it the intrinsic reward of feeling good during and after the work. It is, then, not a surprise that appeals to emotion appear in our expressions of apology and excuse as well. Somehow, we are bad people if our trespasses are logic based (think of the concept of "premeditation). But if they are emotion based, we are just people who make mistakes. We didn't behave out of evil, but rather, we just over-reacted to our own emotions. Artest implies this here as well. He minimizes what he has done by making sure we understand that he did not draw up a plan on the bench to strike Harden and take out the sixth-man of the year. Rather, his action was an unplanned emotional outburst-- natural reaction to just having out-performed the likely league MVP (KD) and on of the best interior defenders on the league (Ibaka).

2) "It was unfortunate that James, you know, had to get hit. . ."
There are a couple things going on in this sentence. One is embedded in the word "unfortunate." Here, Artest transfers agency away from himself and onto the concept of fortune--fate, destiny, Moira. The elbow wasn't the action of a person but rather of plain old bad luck.

The second salient feature of this sentence is the use of passive voice. That is, in the structure of this sentence, no one does any hitting. Harden simply was hit. In fact, he "had to be" hit. Artest conspicuously leaves himself out of the action of this sentence. My sister Tina, a Spanish translator for an insurance company with a highly sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the language, once talked about her occasional frustration in dealing with insurance claims based on a cultural reluctance in many Spanish speaking countries to admit wrong-doing (as we all know, in auto-insurance claims, "fault" is a big deal after an accident). In Spanish, she says, it would be very uncommon for a person to say "I did such and such," but rather "such and such was done [by me]." So, the syntax of the language is actually structured in such a way that actually forces speakers to distance themselves from action.

Since she's told me about this feature, I've been more sensitive to this occurring in English, a language that privileges agency and active voice verb constructions. In English, if someone is leaving themselves out of a sentence, is is conspicuous and telling. And this is exactly what Artest does here. No one hit Harden. Rather, it is simply something that happened. In fact, it is something that "had to" happen--again, an act of fortune, or misfortune, as the case may be.

And all this happens even before he finally simply claims that it was "unintentional." All the features I've pointed out here function to distance Artest from his own actions. He minimizes his own agency, deferring instead to emotion and to fortune (twice each, as it turns out). It's an "apology" that, again, shares the features of confessions made by a criminals who make admissions with their defense still in mind. So, to those of us who were already critical of Artest, his statement hardly seems like an apology at all. These are not the words of a contrite man who had been trying to change his image only to have this setback. Rather, they are the words of a man who had really not changed that much at all.