Paradigmatic Tensions
Do you remember Byron Hawk's "Rhetoric and Network Culture"? He begins the work, drawing from Mark C. Taylor's The Moment of Complexity, by claiming that "the desire for simplicity has haunted rhetoric and composition for most of its history." He then positions two opposing paradigms in composition/pedagogy theory: expressivism which abandons systematized theories of writing and teaching altogether, and process (and postprocess)-oriented theories enacted by "rhetoricians of various stripes who have tried to produce simple systems that make writing teachable" (831). The unteachable/teachable binary Hawk draws here should help us perhaps more fully understand the tension between disconnected theory and pedagogical research, as it has been raised both by participants in our classroom discussions as well as in the literature we've been reading all term. The application of theory to pedagogy will always simplify, codify and reduce the complex act of writing. The desire for this application is practical, utilitarian and very desirable, but it can also limit our scholarship.
Hawk's attention to this tension should also help us understand another major (and related) conflict which emerges in the study of rhetorical theories, and one that has come to light again and again in our readings, that between the autonomous writing agent and the frame, the actor and the activity system, the agent and the complex network or ecology. Process theories and pedagogies position writing as an autonomous act undertaken by an individual writer in a series of progressive acts. If we come to know what these progressive acts are, we can teach writing? Write? The social-epistemic movement in composition theory, on the other hand, positions the writer and her writing as negotiating complex social interactions within a community. And while this social "turn" moves our theories away from the isolated writer, it also perpetuates a model in which the writing subject is central. She is negotiating a complex social environment. Hawk's appropriation of Taylor's complexity theory, as well as scholarship we've read on ecology theories, moves us away from these subject-centric paradigms toward a view of writing which imagines the individual as one of many actors in a complex ecology. The tension that emerges between these two paradigms (subject-centric and what we might call system or network-centric) is here to stay because process is here to stay. Process is thoroughly entrenched in our teaching and our scholarship. It is a frame we cannot escape.
And perhaps we are forever married to process because is teachable. Does that assume that network-centric theories are "unteachable"? Can we build a pedagogical theory that contradicts itself and presents both paradigms and their tensions? I don't know. But I do know that we should not neglect the study of theoretical advances for the purpose of reconciling pedagogy and theory. Simply put, attending to the frame, attending to the complex system or ecology, yields deeper understandings of writing.
Authority and the Blog
Focusing more on the ecology means focusing on the technologies and media in which we write. To this end, how does the blog, as a writing technology, as a genre, a medium, as an extension of the instantiation of the academic genre that is English 592a, function? What kinds of discourse does it allow and disallow? What kinds of identities (I'm talking about us) does it co-constitute with other agents in a complex ecology? I've been thinking all morning about Dr. Rouzie's request that, for our final post, we reflect on the social dynamics of the blog. How is the discourse produced in this "frame" different from that produced in our classroom discussions? Jonathon's recent recognition of his shifting positionalities in the classroom, in the seminar, etc, helps me to think about the blog as an active agent in the production of certain kinds of writing, and certain kinds of writers:
I find interesting the ways in which our conceptions of author/ity change when we’re in the classroom (as teachers) in the classroom (as students) and outside of the classroom (as writers). All of the writers on this blog probably have realized by now that I’m unbearably quiet in the seminar classroom but that I’m long-winded as a writer. Almost none of you know that I’m confident (if a little Ludacris) in the classroom (as a teacher). ("I Don't Always")
In this course, and I'll refrain from generalizing beyond that, the blog has allowed a multi-vocal (heteroglossic) production of discourse which was disallowed to a certain extent in the classroom. (Part of this production is certainly influenced by the course requirements, but I'm not willing to give those requirements full agency here). As Jonathon admits above, he is a "long-winded" writer on the blog but more refrained in the classroom. My guess is that other participants in the class feel the same. My own realization is that I'm able to make more complex arguments and take more risks in this space than I would in the classroom. I can draft and compose my thoughts in more productive ways through this medium.
In the classroom, I speak up too, but as I come to a richer understanding of how writing ecologies are central to the enactment of writing (and speaking), I become less convinced that I am enacting my discussion contributions and more convinced that I am merely inhabiting a classroom role (one with some authority) that is predetermined by the academic ecology of "seminar discussion." Here's an example that might help. Do you ever feel, when you attend the first meeting of a course, that you've just got to speak up and say something thoughtful or it will only become more difficult to be a person who speaks up and says something thoughtful in future class meetings? I often do and I think this is because I want to establish myself in a preexisting role or identity in the social dynamic early when those roles are somewhat more fluid than later in the course.
The blog, as it exists in a space that is somewhat disconnected from these classroom dynamics, allows us to adopt more authoritative roles than we might in the classroom. This space acts as an intermediary between our academic and personal identities and, accordingly, also allows more self-disclosure. Both Dedy and Aaron used the term "confession" in moments of self-disclosure on the blog while others (including me) chose to write more openly about personal experiences. How is the technology of the blog acting on us to produce this kind of writing? Typical (historical) usages of this technology are somewhat personal. Furthermore, Barton writes about the blog as a technology capable of helping students develop and understand subjectivity. But perhaps most influential here is the blog's hypertextuality. It affords us authority and permission to self-disclose because we are able to make any amount of appropriations (links to other discourses). When Brianna wrote about her personal experience growing up in Pikeville, she used a photo form another town to help illustrate her writing. Just as we enact authority in the classroom by appropriating (and taking apart/discussing) texts that are assigned to us (and texts that are referred to in texts that are assigned to us), we enact authority in networked writing spaces through appropriation. I think the important difference is that the network offers us such a wider array of possible (appropriate) appropriations in a wider array of modalities: memes, videos, sounds, hypertexts, et al. (In this post, I don't do anything hypertextual. What effect does that have?)
Ultimately, if we want to arrive at complex understandings of writing, we need to consider the technologies and mediums within writing ecologies as participating agents in the production of discourse. (The network is a writing agent. The blog is a writing agent.) My analysis above has been an attempt to make this consideration, and at the same time, an effort to think about how the blog is acting in this course. If we want to arrive at complex understandings of writing, we'll also have to be able to live with the contradictions between subject-centric and systems-centric theories of writing both in our pedagogy and research.
Works Cited
- Hawk, Byron. "Rhetoric and Network Culture." JAC 24.4 (2004): 831-850. Print.
- Barton, Matthew D. "The Future of Rational-Critical Debate in Online Public Spheres." Computers & Composition 22.2 (2005): 177-190. Print.
Very articulately rendered and thoughtful. Bawarshi would call the graduate seminar a genre that exists within a genre system which is part of a genre ecology etc. The course blog is one such genre in the system and calls for certain kinds of writing and subjectivity. I use it in part because of the apparent restraints of the seminar genre. Our work has been greatly enriched by the contributions here of the quieter students. WITHOUT THIS, their voices would remain mute or muted. Plus, here, as you point out, they can appropriate other discourses, use various modes, links, video etc.
ReplyDeleteMy worry about the blog is that some posts won;t get read, or if read, not responded to. I see this here in the blog. If a student speaks in the class, all hear and can respond, as can I. But here, it is possible to work hard on a post and never know if it was read and by how many. A different sort of market logic prevails.
So the blog has its own ecology that overlaps with the face to face ones (since you all have relationships outside the seminar).
On theory as simplification:
If what you say is true, I am not sure that is a bad thing. There is not limit to how fine grained one could get in accounting for complexity in teaching. Add more dimensions, shift theoretical frames or shift the focus, and you can never see it all. Or by the time you do, something has come along to change it. So theory always functions to delimit what we are looking at, to make it intelligible, to define what we are talking about. Theory both expands and limits scholarship. When working, it perturbs.