Tom Liam Lynch :: New Literacies, New Literatures

My sister-in-law went to an info session at her son’s school recently to learn about online safety. By the end of the session, she was ready to destroy the home computer to save her two adolescents from the many dangers of cyberspace. The school should know better than to rattle off a litany of Things-To-Be-Afraid-Of. Let’s consider an analogy.

Imagine that a school calls an emergency meeting to warn parents of a new worry. Apparently, students are being exposed to media that models brutal attacks on others, comical raping of women, and adolescent suicide. As parents and teachers rally to expel such material from school, they are informed by a sheepish English teacher that the media in question are the Odyssey, Canterbury Tales, and Romeo & Juliet. In this imagined school, the school raises honest concerns and truthful points, but it does so with neglect of its role as a place of learning. A school must respond to the darkness of literature with pedagogy.  A school must be expose, interpret, and critique phenomena.  It must do the same for the new literacies students engage with online. To raise awareness without a curricular plan is negligent, or at least rash and alarmist.

Why are schools running away from these new literacies? To be fair, we have always run from them. Recall the disdain with which Socrates speaks of writing in the Republic.  Writing– the newest technology at time–rang for him the death of the mind.  Fortunately for western history, his student Plato didn’t share his technophobia.  But, there are still others–not just Socrates and schools–who fear the power of technology.  Consider Cairo.

Recently, the Egyptian government found itself in an unimaginable situation.  In response to the government’s efforts to stunt public protests, an underground group of thousands of technophilic young people orchestrated a series of dissident activities.  When the ringleader was caught and interrogated–or tortured, by some accounts–his interrogators demanded, of all things, his Facebook password.

The political resistance was created, discussed, planned, and fueled by a Facebook group.  This raises important questions about the role of schools here.  Do schools–and perhaps English teachers most of all–have a responsibility to teach into responsible and critical use of new literacies? Is the paranoia of some adults merited? Especially when we see how new literacies like Facebook can lead to subversive political action?  Whether you agree or not with the policies of the Egyptian government, at the end of the day Facebook helped a group of users break the law.

Somewhere between paranoia and protest are answers to these questions.  Democratic candidate Barack Obama might be on to something.  His campaign has walked the line by providing open source wiki-like capabilities for his supporters and still maintaining a top-down strategic structure.  All with programs that our students would be very comfortable on: social-networking, blogs, micro-blogs, and the list goes on. Schools must teach in to these new literacies because, as I’ve written before, school is not about school.  It’s about non-school, that is, what happens when students are out there in the world.  It’s not just about the worries of paranoid adults or the harnessed verve of youthful protesters.  It’s about pedagogy.

I have found myself listening to two albums over and over recently.  The first, Timbaland’s Shock Value and the second, T.I.’s Paper Trail.  In both cases, I am struck over and over again at how hypnotic their beats are.  Sitting on the train, ready to fall asleep after a week’s work, I’ll suddenly feel my foot tapping and head moving as some new track plays in my headphones.

The way beats are made can range wildly.  On the one end of the spectrum, there seems to be traditional method of digging through crates of old vinyl, of pulling out of one song a break or a sample that can then be used to create another song.  A producer of beats might pull out just two trumpet notes off a Miles Davis album.  Those two notes then, once digitized, can be used in virtually any way the producer wants.  Shock Value opens this way.  Timbaland samples the piano riff from the opening of Nina Simone’s Sinnerman.  He then loops the riff–makes it repeat over and over–and then builds his own hip-hop beat around the sample.  On the other end of things, some producers build beats from scratch using a hodgepodge of sounds, many custom sounds created by the producers themselves.  In this case, samples used might be hardly at all noticable.   In any case, the way in which beats are produced in recording studios fascinates me as an educator.  The production embodies inquiry at its best.

For example, watch this clip of Timbaland making a beat for Busta Rhymes:

Timbaland and Busta in Studio on Youtube

The two artists seem to interact so casually.  Timbaland lounging on a chair, Busta playfully bemoaning his need for a hot beat.  But, it’s out of this seemingly unproductive banter that a beat is uncovered; a moment of artistic insight is born.  This curious moment–the moment of insight–was written about in a recent New Yorker article.  In the article, Jonah Lerher describes how turning the brain “off” might be the key to turning insight on.  He describes the Nobel Prize winning scientist who, in order to trigger insight, visits, of all places, exotic dancing halls.  While the scene with Timbaland and Busta isn’t filmed in a strip club, it does suggest that playful socializing helps create moments of insight.  Recall: Busta jokingly hits a few keys, hears something catchy, and Timbaland takes it from there.  Before you know it, Busta’s writing lyrics and the song is born.

What does this suggest about the way students learn?

Others have explored the way the mind works in nontraditional creative environments.  Those spearheading  inquiry into studio thinking seem to be researchers from art education.  Howard Gardner’s work with Multiple Intelligences and Project Zero, or the work of Graeme Sullivan at Teachers College, are just some examples of education scholars trying to understand and justify less traditional, more imaginative workings of the mind.  The idea that socializing, meandering, bantering as just forms of unfocused minds might be called into question.

In the midst of this Information Age as well, I might say that it’s not acutally information that is prized.  It’s imagination and creativity.  It’s not the acquisition of knowledge; it’s the exploration of possibility.  If our goal is to give students a chance to explore the myriad ways their minds work, to stretch and bend their thinking processes, more time in studio spaces might outweigh a lifetime of study.

Teachers can’t wear political buttons, can’t talk politics with students, a recent article says.  Despite the NYC Department of Education’s prohibition, I’ve heard colleagues describe teaching itself as a form of political activism.  They say, for example, that any book an English teacher chooses to teach is a political choice.  If I teach Rushdie rather than Sophocles, I make a political statement.  While I admire their enthusiasm, I’m cautious.  The classroom is about intellect, not rhetoric.

Though in the past I’ve criticized the work of Stanley Fish, his new book should cause the politicking teacher to pause.  In Save the World on Your Own Time, Fish makes the case against professors who use their classrooms as political platforms.  The teacher’s job is to teach his content knowledge.  That’s it.  Fish launches his attack by critiquing the language of university mission statements, which pledge to create caring students who will be critical and politically mindful citizens.  In many more words than this, Fish tells such schools to shut up and teach.  Teachers have a body of knowledge they are to impart and a reserve of analytical skills specific to their discipline.  Politics has no place in the classroom during school hours.

Some would argue, as Fish anticipates, that the very act of teaching is political.  He responds to it by saying that the everything-is-political argument is ineffective exactly because of its breadth: if everything is indeed political then it’s hardly a starting point for argument.  There’s nothing to argue if the point of argument lacks distinction.  Saying everything nullifies anything.

The limit of Fish’s own argument is his definition of teaching.  Often, while reading the book, it’s clear that Fish has a very specific definition of teaching in mind: learning is conveyed, not uncovered; meaning is distributed, not made.  Fish is a professor more than a pedagogue.  He professes things more than he teaches students.

At the same time, his take on the role of colleges in shaping the character of the young–that they can do no such thing–is refreshing.  Fish slices through rhetoric with undaunted deftness and the language of university mission statements amounts to bad writing, pseudo-poetic nothingness.  Slice away, Professor Fish.  I even agree with him on the issue of politicking professors.  The role of scholars is to present ideas fairly for students to explore and analyze.  Let the students grapple with the ideas.  Students’ learning is their own business.

This tension between teaching and learning isn’t lost on Fish’s contemporary, Gerald Graff, current president of the Modern Language Association.  He wrote recently,

“For all its obvious value, excellent teaching in itself doesn’t guarantee good education. The courses taken in a semester by a high school or college student may all be wonderfully well taught by whatever criterion we want to use, but if the content of the courses is unrelated or contradictory, the educational effect can be incoherence and confusion.”

As Graff seems to be pointing out, even thoughtful or engaging pedagogy isn’t enough if it doesn’t take into account certain content markers, skill sets, and the teachings of colleagues.  Fish stops shy of paying this sort of attention to teaching method and the contexts of students’ experiences; Graff is well aware, but drifts away from content into the waters of methods. Both would have a great deal to say about politics in our New York City classrooms. When the Chancellor declared that all teachers must remain politically neutral, the United Federation of Teachers president, Randi Weingarten, responded that “students can only benefit from being exposed to and engaged in a dialogue about current events.”  In the context of a unit on the presidential election process, I could see students engaging dialogically on the issues.  But not all exposure is edifying: buttons and bumper stickers are monolgic and rhetorical.

At the heart of the matter is the difference between teaching and learning.  Fish has his own sense of what the former means; no one–not Chancellor Klein nor Ms. Weingarten nor I–really knows what the latter is at all.  Learning is subjective, internal, private.  Learning happens when the student is ready for it and all teachers can do is provide opportunities and catalysts for that moment.  It’s clear that Fish has a great deal to teach us.  He also has a lot to learn about learning.  As do we all.

If you are reading this on a computer at a New York City public school, please click on the following link and watch what happens: http://www.facebook.com/. You will probably see something like this:

Legally, schools are allowed to prohibit access to certain sites they think are not suitable for students. My question is, How do certain sites get labeled inappropriate for student (and teacher) use? I choose Facebook as an example.

Facebook, along with Myspace and others, are popular web sites used for social networking. These sites have many possible uses, socializing with friends being the primary one. The site itself allows different members to connect and exchange information, to communicate. There are various levels of privacy and publicity so that members can self-regulate. It seems to me that schools prohibit the use of such sites because they associate them with non-academic, silly playtime. They ignore, however, the possibilities for learning that are yet untapped.

It’s worth noting one major point of complexity with social networking sites. The sites seem like they are private, like the user is hanging out and catching up with friends. However, depending on the privacy settings, this “catching up” might well be out there for the whole cyberworld to see. It feels so private, yet it can be so incredibly public. Consider this: Colleges have been known to look at the social networking pages of those applying to them for school. The Princeton University newspaper reported that graduate schools admissions offices admitted openly to checking applicants’ Facebook pages. It gave them a rounder sense of students’ character, they said. It also gave them a negative impression about fifty percent of the time.

Should schools use the internet at all? Whether it’s for learning about students or teaching students how to communicate online? Does an English teacher, for example, have an obligation to teach his students how to blog? What is the role of the internet at school? The debate is ongoing, with the voices of students, parents, teachers, and administrators calling out from every direction. These voices might almost be as loud as the sounds of keyboards trickling.