Tom Liam Lynch :: New Literacies, New Literatures

I recently attended the National Council of Teachers of English annual conference.  This year it was in San Antonio, Texas.  The theme for the conference was “Shift Happens,” shift referring to the move from old literacies to new ones, from print media to digital.  Over the period of a few days, it became clearer to me than ever why new literacies mark the beginning of the end of English.

There are two observations I made during my time at the conference that have subtle significance to the state of English.  First, though both sessions I presented at had in their titles some reference to online literacies (MySpace in one; online in the other), we as presenters were not guaranteed either a data projector (so that the computer screen could be viewed from afar) orinternet access.  During my second presentation, I was told that internet was provided for only two rooms and that was all.  This was a conference with over twenty thousand teachers on teaching. Secondly, as I wandered up and down the aisles of the convention center where sponsors and vendors had set up booths, I was struck by how few of them had anything seriously to do with moving English beyond print media.  I strolled past bevies of book publishers, test preppromisers , and the occasional grammarian.  In short, the conference on shift happening made clear to me why shift is not in fact happening.  It’s because the people who need to take it seriously aren’t; their time, money, and effort is still stuck in the Print Age.

There are voices in English education and adjacent fields who are writing passionately and thoughtfully about our current state.  But from the looks of this convention,their voices are going unheard.  While recently reading a collection of essays called, Adolescent Literacy: Turning Promise into Practice, I was struck by voices likeKylene Beers, Donna Alvermann, and Sara Kajder .  Each offered an awareness of our current tension.  Beers draws attention to a sad irony–as students’ deftness in new literacies is broadening, policy makers are shrinking the definition of literacy itself so that it is more “accurately” assessable. Alvermann builds on this point, emphasizing that in addition to the narrowing of our definition of literacy, current teachers have trouble relating to themultiliteracies of their students; it’s no longer about language alone.  Finally, even Kajder’s efforts to concretize the use of technology in the classroom, while helpful for teachers to whom it is new, falls short of suggesting ways to infuse curricula with new literacy awareness and practice.  But, if infrastructural support is not in place, then very little of the above theorizing and research matters.

I’m finding a similar incongruity in my role as the technology and media coordinator at my Manhattan middle and high school.  Our administration would like to help bring the school culture and pedagogy into the digital age: conversations about SMART boards and data projectors and class web sites.  Step one, however, is far less romantic.  First we have to have computers in each classroom that are only for teacher use.  Without an infrastructure in place that can support hefty software and access web sites at high speeds, the rest is little more than a mirage.  And even though my administrative colleagues are on board with this, we now face the gauntlet of actually getting equipment and other orders in from the Board of Education.  It’s boring, dirty, and essential work.  My school, I’m happy to say, is putting its money and time behind the unglamourous task ahead.

New literacies do indeed mark the end of English.  English, as my experience at the NCTE conference supports, is dedicated to the Print Age–books, pages, pencils, paper.  Students know that there is something newer, more powerful, and interesting out there.  Teachers, unless they receive authentic institutional, infrastructural, and professional support, will do as they have done.  Shift will not happen.  In fact, shift does not need to happen.  We need infusion. It is a concerted effort to infuse pedagogy with new literacies that is needed. It can begin with suiting classrooms seriously with access to those new literacies: optimized computers, dependable Internet, and on-site digital literacy coaching.

The end of English teachers is near, I’m afraid.  While it has been a couple centuries, the time has come to acknowledge the need to move on.  English teachers haven’t been defeated, perse .  They have been subsumed by media well beyond the purview of the English language, literature, reading, and writing.  Our task now is to transition out of teaching English as traditionally understood and begin to think and teach in terms of these new media.  The transition comes with challenges.

Traditional teaching of English is inextricably linked to devilish content certainty.  Just consider this exchange from a highly regarded (and used) 19th century textbook, Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres:

Q. On what is Metaphor founded?
A. On the resemblance which one object bears to another.  It is a comparison in an abridged form. “A Minister upholds the state, like a pillar;” is a comparison. “A Minister is the Pillar of the state;” is a metaphor.
Q. Does this figure come near to Painting?
A. Yes. Its peculiar effects is to make intellectual ideas visible to the eye, by giving them colour, substance, and sensible qualities.
Q. What is the first rule to be observed in the conduct of Metaphors?
A. They should be suited to the nature of the subject of which we treat; neither too many, nor too gay, nor too elevated for it. *

The Reverend John Marsh, who adapted the book in 1822 from a longer edition, has several other similar rules for how one should use metaphor.  He notes in a footnote, quite seriously it seems, that this first rule, “*… should be particularly attended to by young writers, who are apt to be carried away by an admiration of what is showy and florid, whether in its place or not.  A great secret in composition is to know when to be simple.”  O, how we long for the days of such content clarity and unabashed authoritative teaching!

Those days are long, long gone.  The days ahead are much closer to what Marsh’s contemporary Herman Melville tried to accomplish in Moby Dick: a genre-bending tale with irresponsible and spotty narration that seeks to flip tradition on its ear.  In these new times, content is both everything and nothing; the notion of disciplines in academia crumbles as governments build emergency scaffolding around it in the form of quantitative tests.  Disciplines–and, for our purposes, English–would be best to follow the path of the Pequod: after some lofty meandering, have the decency to sink.

There is no more content, not as we have known it.  Whereas in the past, Rev. Marsh might have rattled off the content of English with certainty, I imagine our current experiences with online literacies, video/audio production, remixes, emails, and other digital tools would have left him wordless. Here’s the twist: English has always been a technology and media studies course; only, it focused on one medium–the written word.

Above, I said that English is subsumed by tech and media studies, but in actuality, it always has been just a single specialized branch of such studies.  It was the technological innovation of the stylus, according to Walter Ong, that changed the way peoples communicated.  For Ong, writing is a technology.  The next major innovation might be the printing press, which standardized printed word and enabled individuals to mass produce it quickly.  These two technological tools privileged written media.  Of course media studies was synonymous with English class.  Literature and other written and performed derivations were all we had.  However, in the 20th century, as film, television, and the internet began challenging and co-opting written media, English teachers began to splinter.  Today, it is still writing and reading the dominates our work.

Let’s let English go.  Let’s let other media have their time as well.  We must share curricula between literature, film, music, and online texts.  Perhaps, in later studies, curricula can make room for specialized courses like 19th Century American Literature, or Youtube Film Studies.  Let’s be suspicious of other disciplines that seem steady and stately.  Let’s re-read our own narrative with Ishmael, rather than Starbuck, in mind.

The new season of Top Chef starts in one week. By that time the world will know who our new president is, and I’ll be quite glad to be back to serious television.

In short, Top Chef strikes me as the more legitimate competition. In both television series, competitors wrest for a prize–culinary repute on the one hand and political power on the other. In Top Chef, however, the competitors spend a fixed amount of time responding to specific challenges, relevant to the wished-for job. They must rely on their own talents which, however well-boasted such talents might be, will be tested and evaluated by qualified judges. If your chicken piccata is made with bread crumbs, Chef Colicchio will tell you it’s not good enough and that any chef worth his salt knows that you only use flour for that dish. Last season, when competitor Spike used frozen scallops in a challenge and defended it by saying that it was in the restaurant’s walk-in and therefore the owner of the kitchen was to blame for having such low quality ingredients in the first place. The owner, Chicago icon Rick Tramonto, fired back that purveyors deliver sub-par foods all the time and only a rubbish chef would send rubbish out of his kitchen. At the end of the series, regardless of how staged it all seems or how many advertisers are slipped into challenges, the viewer can sleep soundly knowing the competitors were tested with thoroughness and relevance.

In presidential elections, however, the “challenges” are empirically miles away from the presidency.  What does a pseudo-debate in which candidates from both sides dance around each other’s policies and ideas have to do with getting politics done for the country?  If Top Chef were run like an election, competitors would submit a video claiming the right to compete, spend weeks debating each other about how to best prepare one dish over another, and direct viewers’ attention to pictures of past dishes they made, and maybe even a menu or two.

No one would watch it.

And yet the country is gripped by this presidential election. I’m all for passion in politics, and by that I mean rigorous assessment of politicians abilities and ideas, not a televised mock interview based on twisted track records and rhetoric. At least Top Chef demands some culinary proof. When it comes to the presidency, we have to choose a candidate without so much as tasting a spoonful.

Our schools, too, can learn something from this tension between Top Chef and Top Chief.  At times it seems like we settle for the appearance of achievement rather than learning.  Appearance of achievement comes in the form of standardized test scores and other seemingly factual assessments.  In reality, such scores are as manipulable as language.  It’s illusory assessment.  If you’re a state trying to boost math scores, the solution is simple: make the test easier.  Math teacher friends of mine say that’s exactly what New York did a number of years ago.  Whether it’s cooking or politicking or teaching, we all have a commitment to ensure that the assessments matches the job.  This begs the question: Since we have a show dedicated to cooking and bevies of shows for the presidential race, how far away are we from the next great reality TV show, Top Teach?