Advocacy and Agency: On Being a Highly Literate Parent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Gotye and Digital [Pop] Culture

This post is intended to argue that the Gotye mash up above is evidence of Gotye's understanding of the mindset of digital culture. But instead of jumping right in, I intent to enter the conversation through the back door, in order to provide some theoretical background to what I am going to argue about Gotye's piece.

A couple years ago, Steven Hopkins, a graduate school colleague of mine wrote and presented a paper for a graduate seminar in which he presented the Gregory Brothers as an example of web 2.0 success (I hope I don't mis-state his argument. If I do, I look for him to correct me in the comments section). The Gregory Brothers, a musical group made up of a set of brothers and one of their wives, are now known for Autotune the News, the Obama Kick Ass Song, and of course the Bed Intruder Song (a phenomenon that I've addressed in the past).

Understanding the Gregory Brothers' success relies on two concepts important to theorists of digital culture and literacy. The first is Alexander Reid's concept of Rip/Mix/Burn. Reid cites Lawrence Lessig as the originator of the idea, which states basically that participatory digital culture relies on the ability of participants to rip material from other sources, and to combine these artifacts until a new artifact is produced through these combinations. Reid argues that this is, in fact, how cognition works. If this is the case, all cultural artifacts (whether art, discourse, or any other intellectual endeavor) are culminations of the artifacts, attitudes, ethics, and tropes that influenced them. This understanding, to Reid, problemitizes our understanding of issues like copyright, since nothing can truly be the product of one author/artist. All intellectual work is communal.

In the digital era, this process of Rip/Mix/Burn is exemplified in artifacts like fanzines, YouTube mash ups, and so on.  This is, of course, what the Gregory Brothers do on their websites. In order to make their videos, they bring together news clips, soundbites, and images and set these to music. So, they start with other people's copyrighted material, mix it up, add their own creativity, and produce something new.

The second important concept in understanding Web 2.0 success is Michele Knobel and Colin Lanksheare's idea of a Web 2.0 "mindset." For Lanksheare and Knobel, print culture was built around a "scarcity model." Hemingway was valuable because there was only one of him, and his success relied on his having been signed by Scribner. In order to become a successful writer, one must do so through the professional mediator of a publishing house. If one was to become a successful musician, one must be signed to a record deal. In this mindset, value came from an artifact's rarity, and the dissemination of that artifact was carefully controlled by professionals who supposedly knew what was good, and what would sell.

Web 2.0, on the other hand, functions according to a proliferation model. One becomes successful in digital culture by "going viral." And this relies, not on the professional wisdom of publishers and recording studios, but on the mouse clicks of viewers who like what they see and hit the share button. The Gregory Brothers, a band, became popular not when they were noticed by a studio for their "original" pieces, but when they were noticed by Internet users for their mash ups. Culture, according to Lanksheare and Knobel is shifting in such a way that this mindset will become dominant.

The entertainment industry proper, however, has been reticent to the changes this second mindset calls for. The entertainment industry, and the music industry in particular, has in fact, engaged in open warfare with the second mindset through  anti-piracy movements and PSAs, and law makers have responded with bills like the SOPA. The recording industry, including many musicians, has often militantly protected copyright. In this way, the industry has been rather retrograde with respect to its response to digital culture.

Because of this,I was a bit surprised and also pleased with this video by the recording artist Gotye. To produce this video, Gotye (who signs the video with the shortened form of his given name "Wally") trudged through the numerous parodies and covers of his song "Somebody that I Used to Know" that had been posted on YouTube and pieced together a new rendition of the song using these clips. Rather than circling the legal wagons and going after all of these video makers for copyright violation, he has instead himself ripped these samples, mixed them, and produced something from them. He has helped write his own fanzine.

This suggests that Gotye has adopted what Lanksheare and Knobel call the "second mindset." He hasn't just allowed the remixing of his song, but has in fact participated in the remixing process himself. In this way, he shares authorship with his audience, in much the same way as a blogger does when he enables the commenting function on a blog, then responds to commenters. He's allowed his sing to become an artistic wiki. Furthermore, he acknowledges that the form of the remix was ityself "inspired" by [ripped from] a Kutiman YouTube video. He also provides a link list to all the "original videos" of the "Somebody" covers he has used, and admits (in a tone that looks like apology) that he could not include all of the covers  he found.

What Gotye seems to understand is what the rest of the industry seems to have missed with regard to the new mindset: that the parodies and samples of his song did not harm him by violating his copyright. Rather, they brought attention to the song and they added to the conversation about its value. He seems to understand that art is a communal process, in which artists (and consumers) inspire and react to one another. The image of a solitary genius is a myth. Authorship is always shared. And the result of this shared authorship, in this case, is a haunting and aesthetically beautiful piece in its own right.

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.

Writing Students (and teachers) Take Heart; What we're asking you to do is really hard

Writing terrifies students.

Many of us who have been writing for a long time, or are "talented" writers, see writing as a relatively natural process. It's only putting language down on paper, after all. Yet our students shriek, shake, and cry with fear when we give them even "simple" writing assignments. Indeed, the act of writing paralyzes our students.

Flower and Hayes have explained the cognitive processes involved in the writing of actual written language, and their explanation helps to explain why the act of writing so befuddles our students. They explain that "the information generated in planning may be represented in a variety of symbol systems other than language." The ideas that generate writing often come in the form of images, sense memory, emotions and "even when the planning process represents one's thought in words, that representation is unlikely to be in the elaborate sytax of written English" (1981). The act of writing, to Flower and Hayes, is an act of translating ideas (which are non-linear and jumbled) into linear written English.

Writing, therefore, is an extememly complex cognitive process which requires our students to produce formal written English for discourses with which they are still infamiliar out of the jumbled mess of human cognition.

It's no wonder then that many of our students are overwhelmed by the task of writing. What we are asking them to do is difficult stuff--difficult stuff that we ourselves have often taken for granted. This is something to remember when we are frustrated that our students "just aren't getting it." We are asking them to lift heavy weights.

Since this is true, we must be careful not to assume that good writing just is. Instead, good writing is a carefully developed skill. We should see ourselves less as gurus or shamans, guiding them through the spiritual and mysterious process of writing, hoping that their exposure to our gods will magically enlighten them. Instead we should see ourselves as physical trainers, helping them learn to isolate their writing muscles. Though the act of writing is complex and recursive, the processes that make up this complex act can be isolated and trained. If we can help our students do this, then the act becomes easier and more natural (as it is for us) when they must put these processes back together to complete acts of meaningful writing.

But this requires careful work and patience on the part of both the teacher and the writer. So take heart, if it seems like this stuff is really hard, that's because it is. But just as you wouldn't give up working out the first time your muscles are sore, so you must not give up the first time your brain hurts. This includes both you students and you teachers.

Brown in Oklahoma: the Frightening Social Statement of the 2010 Elections

With this year's election having ended, it is time for the post-mortem to begin. I have little doubt that some who read this post will take it as evidence that I have finally slipped to the left. I will be especially pleased when one of you accuses me of pulling the "race card." I have been extremely vocal about the state questions and political platforms in this year's campaigns that I see as obtusely closed-minded and transparently racist. And to my chagrin, though not to my surprise, I have seen all of these measures and people win. So, in this post I will look at these measures, what they mean, and what this election should teach us about who we are as a people and as a state.

SQ 751: English-Only

This is the question that, as a Composition and Rhetoric student with a devout interest in literacy, I have been most interested in and vocal about. State Question 751, which passed by a margin of basically 75% to 25%, makes English the official language for state business transactions. By law all state documents will now be printed only in English.

It's important here to note that I spend four days a week surrounded by language experts - English experts at that. And yet, I do not know of one of us who thinks that anything like SQ 751 is a good idea. Of course, no one thought to ask the experts about this. If they had, we could have told them all about the practical dangers of such a law. As literacy experts, we could have explained to them that speaking a language and writing a language are distinctly separate, even if related, processes. Doing one does not guarantee the ability to do the other. What this means from a practical standpoint is that legal immigrants with perfectly sufficient spoken English may not be able to read it a bit. So SQ 751 has put legal and tax-paying Oklahoma residents in a situation in which they may not be able to fill out Oklahoma Student Loan Authority forms, Sooner Care forms and applications, Driver's license tests and other state documents. Thus, we've blocked access to opportunities and services that spur the upward mobility that we pretend to privilege in what we mythologize as an open and free society.

We could have told them these things, but they never asked us. That's because the actual issue of language was never the point anyway. Instead, this has been yet another example of what John Trimbur has called the discourse of literacy crisis. This is the populist belief that the English language is in crisis and that the result, if not remedied, will be cultural dissolution as well. As a recent case in point, News 9 broadcaster Kelly Ogle, in his consistently asinine segment "My Two Cents" asserts that, "the English language is the common thread that will keep this country from fragmenting into competing ethnic communities" (Ogle). I should add here that he is responding (and disagreeing with) a woman who is angry that her child should learn the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish. . .in a Spanish class.

Of course, such an argument assumes that 1) we're not currently fragmented into ethnic communities, and 2) that English- only legislation has anything whatsoever to do with cultural unity. Both of these are highly dubious claims. The persistent narrative that allowing a multiplicity of languages will lead to linguistic chaos, which will lead to cultural and political chaos is, rather than an actual realizable fear, according to Trimbur a displacement of real fears about middle class loss of status. In her article "When I close my Eyes, I like to Hear English" Amy Dayton-Wood, citing linguist Jane Hill points out that the "lack of specific, technical features of language. . .reaffirms the view that language itself does not motivate these crises." Instead, as Trimbur says, "the threat is not that of linguistic chaos but of blurring the lines between 'us' and 'them'" (Trimbur 279). So these crises and the policies that grow out of them re-assert a cultural hegemony that privileges those of us safely in the middle class at the expense of those who came here believing in our cultural myth of America as "Land of Opportunity." It instead becomes the Land-of-Opportunity for those of us who already possess the right language. And so SQ 751, and policies like it are really about protecting "us" by shutting "them" out.

Arizona Law as Oklahoma Platform

If SQ 751 had the unstated goal of shutting "them" out, this goal became explicit among politicians who campaigned by expressing their support of the Arizona Immigration Law. On the surface, it may seem odd that Oklahoma politicians should take a public stand on an Arizona issue, until one realizes that the implication is that, if elected, these politicians would enact similar legislation here in Oklahoma.

I'm a bit more sympathetic to those who place importance on protecting standing immigration laws than I am to SQ 751. Despite thinking that our immigration laws are bad laws in need of liberalization, I can appreciate the view that these laws are still the law of the land, and should therefore be enforced. However, the way some politicians handled this issue is troubling and telling.

One radio ad in particular, funded by the Senate Majority Fund invokes highly charged language, asserting that "Oklahoma is being invaded," and is "endangered by an outside force," dangerous criminals who are "threatening our citizens” (SMF). Such rhetorical moves function by characterizing immigrants as an invading army. They treat an issue of law enforcement as one of war. Thus, the impoverished itinerate farmers, seasonal roofers, and service employees who cross our border are spoken of as if they were enemy combatants - clever Athenians who may build our houses only to hide in the attic waiting for us to fall asleep.

An Aside in 755

It may seem like a digression that at this point I will bring up SQ 755 which, by a 70-30 margin made it illegal for state courts to consider Sharia law or international law in state court decisions, but I will bring it around to make my final conclusions. Kurt Hochenauer, on the online version of the Oklahoma Gazette's opinion section rightfully criticized this law as being "pointless." This is because it is a basic legal principal in our legal system that court decisions are based on state law and the jurisprudence of past court decisions. Neither if these would allow consideration for Sharia law. Justification for the need for this law was the Great Britian has, in some instances, considered Sharia law and international law when prosecuting Islamic prisoners. Of course, since we broke ties with the UK's legal system more that 230 years ago (and 141 years before Oklahoma became a state), what they've done in their courts is totally irrelevant to Oklahoma state law. SQ 755 is a non-law that did nothing except to re-affirm that we don't like Muslims or their law and we don't want to be pushed around by the U.N.

Conclusion: Hatred in the "Bible Belt"

The common thread in these laws is that in effect (and, I would argue, in design) they delineate the state's official stance on who we dislike: Mexicans, Arabs, and Outsiders.

I find it sadly ironic that in the states most proud of their religiosity there also exist laws so specifically designed to express hate. Of course, we justify these laws with arguments about practicality. We simply can't allow this flood of immigrants; how can we support them all? I've also lately seen a lot of the common false claims that immigrants are bankrupting our society by taking advantage of free schools, and hospitals, and that illegal immigrants are receiving welfare, all claims that the National Center for Policy Analysis soundly disproves. The common line of reasoning, especially among people who begin their sentences with platitudes like “I’m all for legal immigration,” or “some of my best friends are Mexicans but. . .) is that "we would love to have an open society, we just can't afford to." Thus, we close ourselves off, we refuse to fulfill the promise of our nation, and we say "you're just not welcome here," despite our founding as a free and open society that would say “send us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. And worse than our failure to live up to our founding principles is that we do so even as we drive around in brand new extremely expensive cars with "Visit Church this Month" bumper stickers pasted to the back.

Cited:

Dayton-Wood, Amy. “When I Close My Eyes, I Like to Hear English: English Only and the Discourse of Crisis.” Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture. 10 Aug 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2010.

Hochenauer, Kurt. “What’s the Point.” OKGazette.com. Oklahoma Gazette. 6 Oct 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2010.

“Immigrants, Welfare, and Work.” NCPA. National Center for Policy Awareness. 24 Jun 2002. Web. 3 Nov 2010.

Ogle, Kelly. “My 2 Cents: Mother Angry Over Spanish Pledge of Allegiance Assignment.” News9.com. KWTV, 28 Oct 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2010

“Senate Majority Fund.” YouTube.com. 26 Oct 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2010.

Trimbur, John. “Literacy and the Discourse of Crisis.” The Politics of Writing Instruction: Postsecondary. Ed John Trimbur and Richard Bullock. Portsmith, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1996.