Tom Liam Lynch :: New Literacies, New Literatures

Over the past several weeks, the blog has been quiet.  In part, that’s because I have a new son and am thoroughly enjoying being a father.  It’s also because I’m at a bit of a crossroads with my doctoral research and hitting a bit of a wall.

In the past, I had expected fully to be writing a dissertation about new literacies and how they relate to the teaching of English, literature especially.  I’m not so sure about that now.  While I do think such a study is important, there are other aspects of education that have begun to intrigue me.  This is greatly due to the new work I’ve begun this year in NYC’s iZone initiative. 

Since beginning the new job, I have become increasingly aware of the way in which educational research does and does not affect how policy makers go about reform.  This gap between scholarship and schools fascinates me.  How does the way educational researchers represent their ideas affect how those ideas are realized in schools?  I wish to spend the next week with this question.  I’ll be posting snippets from some writing I’m doing that begins to grapple with this question.

And I’m asking for any insights and ideas you may have regarding what is needed in the fields of reform and educational research. 

I wanted to take a moment to say thanks: thank you (that is, you, Reader) for supporting my work.  I’ve been spotty over the last few weeks with the birth of my son, Declan.  In the new year, I look forward to seeing how this new being in my life will jibe with the new work I’ve been doing since September–work which I love.

I’ll be looking to gain greater clarity on what my “niche” is on this blog.  (Though, to start, there is a response needed to Michael Horn’s comment to my Disrupting Class post…) I’ll also be looking to narrow my study for my doctorate, which, is still far too broad. 

Still, today is Christmas and I’m simply content: I can hear my son feeding while drinking my coffee, writing to you, and about to head out to family’s for dinner. 

What a merry day indeed!

I’m elated to say that my son, Declan, was born this past Saturday.  Only minutes after his birth, I started reciting the opening proem to Paradise Lost to him in the delivery room.  And he wailed!  I’m afraid we might have a staunch Shakespearean on our hands…

Here’s a pic from just this morning:

Thanks to Erick for the pic!

Edweek reported recently that federal spending is advancing beyond elementary literacy and putting up legislation to focus on adolescent literacy.  I’d like to see Kindles and Nooks brought in to the research realm.  Not to mention more on how re-reading with students can help them confront their histories as readers.

(Thanks to @adlit for the Tweet)

When students have already learned that knowledge is created collectively online and that no one lecturer has the answers, their approach to college changes. So too must professors’ pedagogy. Here’s an excerpt from one professor:

This is where many begin the blame game, and where I part ways with them. Polite, dutiful, and disengaged students deserve neither blame nor scorn. They have become exactly what one would expect of those born during the information age and reared in America’s profoundly pragmatic culture. They are, moreover, not all that different from the population as a whole. Aside from adopting new technologies more readily and accepting new familial patterns more quickly, they are very much America’s sons and daughters. Pinning a generational label on today’s students is unhelpful at best and a disservice to all.

A better and more productive response begins with us — faculty members and administrators. We cannot expect a skeptical populace to reverse course of its own accord. The onus is on us to better convey the value that a robust intellectual life adds to the public good. And we need to begin by respecting our students (and the wider public) not just as persons but as the arbiters of knowledge that they have become. Specifically, we must respect students as thinkers, even though their thinking skills may be undeveloped and their knowledge base shallow. Moreover, our respect must be genuine. Students have keen hypocrisy sensors and do not like being patronized.

Over 800 Videos in Core Content Area Instruction: “

Thanks to Ken Task who shared this collection of videos:

Over 800 videos in categories like Arithmetic, Pre-algebra, Algebra, Geometry,
Linear Algebra, Chemistry, Trigonometry, Biology, and Physics (this list is not complete … see the site for more!)

There is a collection for Finance, Venture Capital and Capital Markets, Banking and Money, Current Economics, and Brain Teasers as well.

Source: http://www.khanacademy.org/

Resource acquired from a TCEA tweet:
http://twitter.com/tcea

The entire video library is shown below. Just click on a category or video title to start learning from the Khan Academy!

Calculus | Precalculus | Trigonometry | Algebra | Finance | Pre-algebra | Arithmetic | Geometry | Physics | SAT Preparation | Probability | Linear Algebra | Differential Equations | Credit Crisis | Banking and Money | Paulson Bailout | California Standards Test: Algebra II | California Standards Test: Algebra I | California Standards Test: Geometry | Venture Capital and Capital Markets | Statistics | Geithner Plan | Current Economics | Brain Teasers | Valuation and Investing | Chemistry | Biology

If you’re looking for a simple way to record and share screencasts, this easy to use site is it. It avoids the hiccups of Jing and you don’t even have to download it.

There is quite a bit of excitement and pedagogical anticipation surrounding eBooks nowadays, especially for English teachers.  Wesley Fryer, for instance, writes with glee:

How amazing it was and is to:

1. Think of a book I’d like to obtain for my son to read.
2. Perform a quick search in the Project Gutenberg database via the Internet for the book.
3. Click a small, simple button: DOWNLOAD– And in seconds, the book is available for us to read and enjoy. For FREE!

This is AMAZING! This is incredible. I know eBooks have been around for awhile, but I’m still amazed to personally experience the ease with which public domain texts like this can be legally downloaded and obtained, and how affordable commercially sold books can be purchased and downloaded as well.

The low cost of eBooks and the quickness with which users might acquire them is indeed exciting.  As someone who spends his days looking for new tools online and trying to marry technology and education in new ways, I share Fryer’s awe.  To a point.  I also worry about the way these new technologies might well only perpetuate a bad habit of English departments, which I call Rented Readings.

Rented Readings–in its pre-digital, analogue form–refers to those specially bound books that we English teachers give students and in which they cannot read.  Rather, they stick post-it notes in them all of which must be thoroughly removed before being returned to the book room.  We rent readings.  We teach students that a book is to be looked at but not scrawled on.  Meanwhile, writing in books is something many English teachers themselves have found useful.

I recall being in an undergraduate philosophy course and watching a colleague mark up his pages as we talked.  There were two immediate reasons I myself did not do that: 1. I was taught the exact opposite in school–writing in books was one way to pay a fine before collecting my report card; and 2. If I wanted drinking money for end-of-semester revelries, I needed to keep my books in tip-top shape so as to command the most Buy-Back-Buck I could from the college bookstore.   (In fact, some friends and I would toast the author of the book whose refunds had bought us rounds… “And here’s to St. Thomas Aquinas for his application of Aristotelian logic to Christian doctrine and for these twenty ounces of fine brew!”)

It seems to me that when we rent books to students we teach them to be renters of reading.  As if to say, Don’t get too comfortable here because the relationship you form with this book is only temporary.  I am not saying that students’ reading experiences can’t stay with them.  Rather, I’m saying that the books should stay with them too, that students should amass their own physical libraries in which they could trace in the marginalia the twists and straightening of their handwriting or the recurring questions that reveal themselves as significant across time and text.

I have in mind Kelly Gallagher’s term “readicide”, which he defines as “the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools”, when I suggest that one readicidal practice is the renting of books to students and the correlative result: rented readership.  Over time, students who don’t pay their rent–by completing assignments and arriving to class with ideas, notes, and enthusiasm–get evicted.  I purpose letting students scar up pages of book, deface the text, impale the book with their ideas and daydreams like you’d drive in screws to a wall to support bookshelves.  While on the one hand the new digital form of rented readings–eBooks–allow us to transport literature anywhere we like, it also, in someways, might make us lifelong renters who never get a chance to stroll around a home built in and of books.

The Kindle is poised to change the way we read, not to mention the ways in which authors write and publishers produce books.  In his insightful article, Steven Johnson lays out several realistic possibilities for the future of reading in an age of the Kindle.  He speaks of a world in which Google can search individual pages of books (the technology is essentially there already), chapters will be bought like iTunes songs (recall the death of the album…no reason to buy eleven humdrum songs when you only want the one with bounce), and even an influx in reading of books as they can be bought on whim (under two minutes from impulse to opening line).  Exciting and frightening.  The former because never before has this kind of reading been possible; the latter because there is a physicality that is fading.  But, what does it mean for teaching literature?

I’ve blogged before about the Kindle and reading, suggesting that it might well entice reluctant readers to get into it precisely because it isn’t a weighty book with many many many pages.  It’s just a sleek light device.  Johnson predicts one of my great concerns for the future of reading literature when he writes about what will happen with the Kindle inevitably goes the path of the iPhone and offers more than just reading books and newspapers:

As a result, I fear that one of the great joys of book reading — the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas — will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.

What will happen to literary imagination when it competes with emails and phone calls?

In his book Private Readings in Public, Denis Sumara talks about the immensely private nature of reading literature.  Wired reading endangers this kind of privacy, which, you could argue, is necessary for the kind of imaginative immersion Johnson mentions.  And what of the labor of turning pages? Or, the feeling of a pen etching into the fiberous surface of the page?

I am certain the reading literature will not be the same from this point forward.  My greater concern, however, is that those of us in English education will just stuff our ears, claim the topic too beneath us to take seriously, and miss shaping the direction of these new literatures.

A recent report on college hazing practices showed that high schools are just as rife with the practice. While the study itself seems well worth a read, it got me thinking about the kinds of subtler hazing that we educators engage in at school.  Don’t we have our own way of hazing students into academic culture?  Gerald Graff draws attention to it in Clueless in Academe saying that educators speak in a secret language that students don’t necessarily understand.  It’s meant to confuse most students and allow others to rise to the top.

What I’d like to see is a student response to our offenses on their intellect and imagination.  It’s physical hazing that we can’t stomach, though.  Intellectual hazing is, for the time being,  just fine.

In the recent issue of English Journal, Viv Ellis writes about why teaching toward understanding sexual identity is important in English education.  He tells a powerful story of a student of his who was cruelly beaten to death, having been labeled gay.  Ellis pinpoints his student’s death as a turning point in his teaching English and sexual identity. It’s a brief piece with a readable balance of the scholarly, the personal, and the pedagogical.

Especially compelling for me was not only Ellis’ astuteness and candor, but also the way he justifies teaching literature at all.  He writes, “Personal growth–in terms of conceptual development, criticality, imagination, socialibility, empathy, morality, and ethics–may be presently an unfashionable phrase but it presists as an ideal for the institution of schooling, and English has an important role to play in the pursuit of this goal.”

In a time when the humanities are losing funding and support, and some teachers are being paid more because of the subject they teach (math and science teachers in Georgia are slated to start out at 5th year teaching pay), I find Ellis’ matter-of-fact defense for teaching literature a breath of fresh air that is currently all too rare.

Next month, I’ll be presenting at a conference on the uselessness of literature in an age of new literacies. It will be at the TCETC (Teachers College Educational Technology Conference) in New York. In short, my argument is that English teachers are being called on to teach into “21st Literacy Skills” more and more, as this past NCTE conference suggests. These new “real-world” skills—searching, filtering, citing, writing online—are being given emphasis because they have a pragmatic end: They are skills students will need to work and live in the decades to come. Literature, however, is use-less. It doesn’t have a comparable pragmatic end. While I don’t agree with the idea that literature is completely use-less, I do think English education needs to do a better job at conveying the value of literature to others. I’m pasting the whole proposal—just under 600 words—below.
- Please visit my blog for more on teaching literature and new literacies: http://www.tomliamlynch.org

Literature as Useless
It has been commonplace recently to pit literature against technology. We read in the news about librarians who are putting books down in order to teach basic information-based research techniques (Rich, 2009). Or, respected voices weighing the effects of new literacies on reading (Gardner, 2008). In another instance, we hear the concerns teachers have that text messaging and online practices are supplanting students’ study habits (Rich, 2008). While on the one hand we read about President Obama’s own love of reading and writing (Kakutani, 2009), his Secretary of Education seemed fine with the dichotomy of books vs. “those electronic gadgets” (Dillon, 2009). English teachers, whose work has always been rooted in literary works, (Applebee, 1974), are understandably affected by new technologies and the literacies they make possible.
On the other hand, literature has been taught as many things: an extension of Christian dogma (Applebee, 1974; Graff, 1987), as a structured object to be deconstructed (Scholes, 1998), and even as a political tool (Scholes, 1986). None of these approaches to literature argue convincingly for its value, however. They assume the value of literature. Furthermore, I suggest that even many groundbreaking works on teaching literature—transactional theory (Rosenblatt, 1983), the balancing of reader experience with authorial intention (Rabinowitz & Smith, 1998), the role of imagination students’ private readings in schools (Sumara, 1996)–while of immense importance, ignore this historical problem that teaching literature has been, at best, tolerably useless. That is, it is use-less and lacks the utility of other disciplines: physics can send human beings to the moon, foreign languages can allow people of different backgrounds to communicate, history teaches students to participate in government. They are useful; literature is useless.
At the end of his detailed history of teaching English in America, Applebee (1974) lists a number of issues the field must confront. He articulates one thus: “The knowledge and goals of the teaching of literature are in conflict with the emphasis on specific knowledge or content” (246). Here he means that English teachers are uncomfortable defining teaching literature “as a body of knowledge” because their goals are not knowledge-based but are “questions of values and perspective” (ibid). That is, teachers of literature have been, according to Applebee, in the business of literary experience and imagination. Thirty-five years later, I argue, this is still very much the case. However, we now face a new problem. It is the English teacher who is being tapped to help guide education into this era of new literacies. But, new literacies research cares little for the imaginative and aesthetic experiences valued by teachers of literature. How can a field that has only held on to the teaching of literature by historical happenstance defend literature against newer literacy needs?
After a brief review of some of the most prevalent voices in new literacies studies—(Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2008), (Alvermann, 2008), (Tierney, 2007)—I issue a call to others in English education. Teachers of literature must make it clearer to the public, to themselves, to our students why teaching literature is important. It is something the field has failed to do. The result has been the slow suffocating of literature in schools. We must accept that not all students will be English majors and that reading literature does not have to mean reading like a professor. New literacies has much to offer the teaching of literature, but it is up to us to make it clear what is teaching literature and what is not. What we need is a New Literatures movement. The Old Literatures approach has taken us as far as it can.

Works Cited

Alvermann, D. E. (2008). Why bother theorizing adolescents’ online literacies for classroom practice and research. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 52(1), 8-19.
Applebee, A. N. (1974). Tradition and reform in the teaching of English. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE.
Coiro, J., Knobel, M., Lankshear, C., & Leu, D. J. (2008). Central issues in new literacies and new literacies research. In J. Coiro, M. Knobel, C. Lankshear & D. J. Leu (Eds.), Handbook of research on new literacies. New York: Lawrence Erblaum Associates.
Dillon, S. (2009, January 13). Few specifics from education pick. New York Times. Retrieved January 17, 2009, from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/14/us/politics/14webduncan.html?_r=1&ref=education
Gardner, H. (2008, February 17). The end of literacy? Don’t stop reading. The Washington Post. Retrieved October 13, 2008, from http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=0&did=1430370181&SrchMode=2&sid=1&Fmt=3&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1223908182&clientId=15403
Graff, G. (1987). Professing literature: An institutional history. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Kakutani, M. (2009, January 18, 2009). From books, new president found books. New York Times. Retrieved March 15th, 2009, from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/books/19read.html?_r=1&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Rabinowitz, P. J., & Smith, M. W. (1998). Authorizing readers: Resistance and respect in the teaching of literature. New York: Teachers College Press.
Rich, M. (2008, July 27). Literacy debate: Online, r u really reading? New York Times. Retrieved October 13, from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?ex=1374897600&en=81a364206914f90a&ei=5124&partner=facebook&exprod=facebook
Rich, M. (2009, February 15th, 2009). In web age, library job gets update. New York Times. Retrieved March 15th, 2009, from http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/02/15/arts/1194837851726/the-21st-century-librarian.html?ref=education
Rosenblatt, L. M. (1983). Literature as exploration. New York: Modern Language Association.
Scholes, R. (1986). Textual power: Literary theory and the teaching of English. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Scholes, R. (1998). The rise and fall of English: Reconstucting English as a discipline. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Sumara, D. J. (1996). Private readings in public: Schooling the literary imagination. New York: Peter Lang.
Tierney, R. J. (2007). New literacy learning strategies for new times. In L. S. Rush, A. J. Eakle & A. Berger (Eds.), Secondary school literacy: What research reveals for classroom practice. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE.

What is Georgia doing?  This is what I read today on the train:

The Georgia House of Representatives signed off on final changes to a plan that boosts the pay of certified math and science teachers. The proposal would allow new secondary school teachers with proper certification to start at the salary of a fifth-year teacher.

This is iconic of a deep problem in education.  Policy makers think of education in terms of content.  That’s it.  Clearly if a teacher teaches math or science, they are more important and worth more money.

But, what about the quality of education?  Have none of us had experiences with math or science teachers who were less than effective?  The message this sends is that pedagogy is not as important as content.  If content is so discrete, however, we don’t need teachers at all.  Just give kids review books and be gone with them.

According to a recent study in the Journal of Research on Technology in Education, there are five reasons educators frequent professional social networks:

1. sharing emotions;
2. utilizing the advantages of online environments;
3. combating teacher isolation;
4. exploring ideas; and
5. experiencing a sense of camaraderie.

The study, though informative, focuses on the effects of such social networks—like the English Companion Ning site—for the participants of those sites.  It doesn’t, however, address how the platform itself—Ning.com, in the example above—affects the ways in which meaning is made.

One thing that has interested me on the ECN site is how message boards are used to grapple with aspects of the profession.  One fascinating discussion that I have yet to examine as closely as I’d like has to do with the difference between literature and reading.  It’s a topic that is relevant to all English teachers, but might not get discussed in schools where our time is pressed constantly, or in journals where the topic might not meet “scholarly” expectations.  (Jeff Jarvis, in his new book WWGD?, makes a brief case for blogs as scholarly publication.  If you are a professor you should have a blog and universities should consider it!)

But this is just the message board feature.  There are others. It could include IMing, for example, which ECN doesn’t currently offer.  It could include pedagogical mash-ups, which I’ve not yet seen on the site.  What about live Skype-sessions? How would those kinds of interactions affect the way we grow professionally?  the way we relate?

I’m interested in why others become part of online communities related to education.  For me, it’s a place to have ideas greeted with something other than a roll of the eyes or silence.  With the advent of video-conferencing, however, a roll of the eyes might be a bit harder to avoid.

For the full article, here is the citation information:
- Hur, J. W., & Brush, T. A. (2009). Teacher participation in online communities: Why do teachers want to participate in self-generated online communities of K-12 teachers? Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 41(3), 279.

Arne Duncan wants new kinds of data from states.  While governors will get billions in stimulus money right away, the second half of the dough will be held until states get straight.  According to the Times,

The data is likely to reveal that in many states, tests have been dumbed down so that students score far higher than on tests administered by the federal Department of Education.

It will also probably show that many local teacher-evaluation systems are so perfunctory that they rate 99 of every 100 teachers as excellent and that diplomas often mean so little that millions of high school graduates each year must enroll in remediation classes upon entering college.

Yes.  It will show both of those things.  Math teacher friends of mine joke about how absurdly easy some exams have gotten as New York has tried to raise test scores.  It’s like watching a bad limbo contest.

But still, while I am all on board with holding school systems more accountable, what these systems do as businesses differs from what teachers do in classrooms.  Data can indeed be gathered about how money is spent: fire up the spreadsheets!  Data can’t be gathered as easily about how students learn.  What does learning look like?

In Disrupting Class, Christensen describes tries to reiterate Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences premise: each student learns differently.  He comes from a business management perspective, which reveals itself several times as he conveys his affection for data and numbers and charts.  Nevertheless, he maintains that education must give students individual room to learn at their own individual pace.  For him, this is where online learning comes in.

Policy makers and scholars and teachers must come to terms with their competing definitions of data.  Until the differences between types of data are addressed openly, students will continue to fall deeper and deeper into the Data Gap.

Laptops aren’t magical. They don’t produce fuzzy bunnies out of the ether; they don’t wondrously change how students learn in classrooms. They are tools. Very powerful tools. But when I read this piece about Maine schools below, I cringed:

State education officials announced three weeks ago that they hoped to provide a laptop to every public school student in grades seven through 12 by fall. The aim is to add 53,000 high school students to the first-in-the-nation program, which now serves students in grades seven and eight.

Teachers must be given support in how to use computers and the internet with students.  If you give out 53,000 laptops that are used to types papers in class, you are wasting students’ time.  Laptops require Internet access with reasonable firewalls.  Is that part of the Maine’s plan?  What good are laptops if students can’t search for “terrorism”?  What’s more, laptops are most effective teaching tools–I would argue–only when teachers are as comfortable on them as students.  Is such training and support part of Maine’s plan?  If it is anything like past initiatives, it is not.  Rather, adding laptops without attention to pedagogy is an illusion.  Much like a magician, in fact.  Just open up the mysterious box, drop in the student’s learning, and watch it disappear.

Critics of laptops in classrooms, slow down.

Staunch proponents technology in learning, slow down too.

While schools have pumped funds in to the use of laptops for students, research hasn’t shown that students’ learning has improved at all.  John Timmer says it well:

In general, the authors argue, the benefits of laptops come in cases where the larger educational program has been redesigned to incorporate their unique capabilities, and the teachers have been trained in order to better integrate laptop use into the wider educational experience. Both of these processes are resource-intensive, and the degree of their success may vary from classroom to classroom even in a single school, which is likely to explain the wide variability in the results.

This should not be a surprise though.  Educators have made the mistake of treating technological devices like magic wands.  Would we expect that merely putting pens in students’ hands would make them deft writers?  Of course not.  It is the teacher who must engage with students on how to use tools for learning.  This goes for pens as well as computers.  Why is it that teachers seem to approach students’ use of computers differently than other tools?  While it should be common sense, the harsh reality of laptops in classrooms is sometimes

that everything from IM chats to online shopping excursions take place over the in-class ether, distracting everyone involved: the student, his or her neighbors, and potentially the professors, who may watch their grip on the classroom slowly slipping away.

What’s slipping isn’t “grip,” it’s pedagogy.  There are two points worth making here.  First, teachers, it seems,  sometimes view any way of thinking that does not fit into their own framework of thinking as uncritical, or laziness.  And yet, a student who is doing more than taking notes in class is as likely to be Googling something that comes up in discussion as he is “spacing out” or IMing.    This leads to a second point: using technology in schools means being open to how it lets students think differently: to think that computers only offer a way to take notes electronically (something that could just as easily be done with a pencil and paper) ignores that it is a multi-modal tool which offers myriad ways to explore and express ideas.

We are all technology teachers.  That is, we are, as educators, responsible for guiding and shaping how our students think and learn with different tools.  Even if we don’t fully understand what students are doing online, we know well how to ask critical questions about it.  We don’t have to know what something is in order to ask students how they are learning through it.  We only have to ask questions.  As teachers, we should be quite good at that.  It’s vital that pedagogy doesn’t give way to technophobia.

Katie Ash recently wrote about online learning and how cost effective it is in K-12 settings.  The debate breaks down like this: While online learning might seem at first to be more cost effective, no detailed studies have proven it; on the one hand, the cost of developing courses can be great, but they can be used by many for a long time; on the other hand, other features of schools like guidance and special services are not available online.  In short, “The answer to the question, experts say, depends on what curriculum is used, whether it is a full-time or part-time program, what state you are in, and how many students you need to serve, among other factors.”

There is something else, however.  A bottom line that Ash and other voices in the piece ignore: quality of learning.

It seems to me that online courses in K-12 settings have many advantages.  Two of the most compelling being that online courses serve to meet students in the cyber-setting that many of our students inhabit and that they do this while also easing the pressure for physical space that drives many public schools–in NYC, for sure–to make difficult curricular decisions. (Principals are told, for example, that any time a classroom is left empty during the day they are not operating “efficiently”.)  These considerations are valid ones.  But what about school-based support for taking online courses?

Imagine students taking most of a course online–whether or not it was designed by their teachers or others is irrelevant for a moment.  Then, on Fridays let’s say, students met for an hour with teachers in their school to talk about their learning meta-cognitively.  The main question being: How are you learning online compared to past and current offline learning experiences?  The goal, in the end, is to make students aware of how they learn best for themselves.

Now, what online courses suggest for certain subjects, though, needs more consideration: What is lost and gained, for example, in the teaching of literature online?  Doesn’t literature require a certain kind of presence and physicality and orality?  Of course, I ask this as an English teacher and as one who has chosen to commit my life to the teaching of literature.  Students, if asked, might well respond that offline learning is, well, just off.

Charter schools might or might not be any better than public schools, so says a recent study.  Hardly epiphic news. The report, in addition to emphasizing the mundanity of its own findings, betrays a fundamental flaw in any attempt to assess the efficacy of education:

But the researchers still found it difficult to determine whether charter school students on the whole were learning more, as measured by their test scores, than they would have in their regular public schools. That’s because most of the elementary schools lacked any base-line data for the kindergarten students they enrolled. When researchers looked at charter secondary schools, they found few differences in learning gains between students in charters…

By “learning more, as measured by their test scores” we see it: Learning = Test Scores.  But it doesn’t.  Research on learning strongly opposes this idea.  And yet it lingers.  Why does it persist?  I think it’s because education, more than any other field I can think of, perpetuates its own failings.  We can never forget that those who are imposing testing and writing tests and administering tests all came through a school system.  Something happened in their education that led to them growing up and thinking that testing was actually going to solve education.  Educations past shortcomings recur.

In recent months, the Obama administration has sung the praises of charter schools and testing.  They want us to believe in the miraculous power of charter schools.  Let’s spare the suspense: Charters are much like other schools.  They test like mad in the wake of NCLB.  They burn out teachers.  They meet the needs of some students and don’t of others.  The main difference, however, in many cases is that students must apply to get in.  Well, parents have to apply to get their children admitted.  There’s the difference!  Parent involvement.  It’s hardly more testing or the establishment of bevies of new charter schools.  Education starts at home, continues at home, and never ends at home.  Education, at its best, isn’t about school.  It’s about everything else.

If only we wrote and shared more about our classroom practice.  If only we flooded teaching journals with our insights and research findings.  But we don’t.  Even journals devoted to secondary education, like English Journal, tend to be made up by article mostly be university educators.  Our voices, as secondary teachers, gets lost.

In a recent article in English Education, Anne Whitney analyzes a decade of articles in four major NCTE journals.  She notes that while teachers writing for “the field” often affects the way they view their own practice, those same teachers are the exception to the rule: teachers aren’t rewarded for publishing their ideas the way professors are.

Is this because our expertise isn’t valued or because we don’t value our own expertise?

While Whitney does an expert job in presenting her findings, she doesn’t explore much how sites like this play into teachers’ sense of community and “field”.  How might blogs and social networks be better used to create a sense of importance and expertise in English education?  I have a friend who is a professional financial blogger.  He posts 6 – 10 postings a day.  And people read it.  People in other fields want to know immediately what is going on all the time.  Can we imagine ourselves so intrigued by the thoughts of distant colleagues?  How might it affect practice?

For related information:
- Whitney, A. (2009). NCTE journals and the teacher-author: Who and what gets published. English Education, 41(2).
- Blog Reader
- NCTE

I am sitting in a doctor’s office. CNN is on. The talk is of job markets, employment, and resumes. As I sit here thinking about a conference proposal I am convinced that teaching literature will crumble.

You can’t put “read Paradise Lost” on your resume. Well, you can but best of luck with that. The fact is we live in especially pragmatic times. The things we do in education must have practical value or we risk losing the ability to teach at all. Literature, as I have said before, lacks practicality. If it does seem to have practical value, I would challenge how it is being read (or taught). How can English educators raise awareness of the value of aesthetic literary experiences? Of teaching students to inquire into who and why they are through fiction?

Perhaps CNN has the answer.

I went to a dinner last night with colleagues from graduate school. One friend was excited to tell us what she just bought. “A Kindle!” she exclaimed. “It’s in the mail as we speak.” A table of English Educators has much to say about the Amazon’s Kindle. The second model especially. From its marriage of tech and literature to its new ability to read aloud to the user.  We mused about what technological devices like the Kindle do to the reading experience.

(The Kindle’s name, of course, is witty: while it itself is paperless it borrows its name from fuel for fire, something paper does quite well.)

As is want to happen in engaging conversations, I heard myself suggest something, that I hadn’t ever considered before: What if the sheer physiciality of reading literature factors into why some students resist reading?  The very things we at the table were holding up as the greatness of reading literature–the weight of the book, its thickness, the smells, the turning of the page, the writing of notes, the placing of finished and unfinished books on the bookshelf–might be precisely what prevents some students from reading literature.

We English teachers come from a very specific perspective.  We think reading is good, vital, and pleasurable.  We have come to enjoy the physiciality of reading; we love reading books.  Students often don’t.

Reading literature doesn’t have to be for our students what it was for us.  (In fact, all accounts it isn’t already and surely won’t be in the future!)  Imagine a classroom in which every student had a Kindle and could download any book they wanted in seconds.  Imagine English departments that didn’t spend thousands of dollars on books, but invested in a limitless subscription to Kindle so that students could download newspapers as well as literature.  What would students say are the differences between reading on a Kindle versus books?

I would love nothing more than to study this question.  (Amazon, if you are reading, I have emailed your PR department with a proposal!) I imagine it would offer at least new insights into our students’ relationship with literature, and might even change the way we ourselves teach literature in our own classrooms.

Recent studies out of the University of Connecticut suggest there is no correlation between a student’s offline and online reading skills. The study defends the notion that “few, if any, of these new literacies have found their way into the classroom.  Indeed, many seem to be resisted overtly, by deliberate educational policies, or covertly, by educators who sometimes are not nearly as literate with the Internet as the students they teach.” Researchers studied the reading strategies of both strong and struggling readers using the state’s reading exam as a measure (even monitoring students’ eye movement with a tiny camera). The study examines the idea that students who perform well on traditional paper-based reading tests would perform well on an online reading assessment as well.  The authors say this supposed correlation between online and offline reading underlies policymakers’ own suppositions when creating literacy benchmarks.  Reading, after all, is reading—isn’t it?

Reading is not reading.  The research finds there to be zero correlation between students’ offline and online reading abilities.

There are limits to the study, of course. Firstly, both tests assessed efferent readings. There was a specific task to be done; there was information to find. The notion of reading as aesthetic or pleasurable was unimportant in the study. Secondly, students are assigned a problem to solve online. They are assigned.  The researchers don’t explore the assigned nature of the task enough.  Students’ online lives don’t tend to include mandated assignments. By institutionally requiring such assignments, you could argue that students’ online behavior will be altered.  They aren’t acting of their own volition.  Together, these two limitations raise questions for English teachers, some new and some old.

Even before Louise Rosenblatt’s work raised question of efferent and aesthetic readings in literature classrooms, the reason to read literature was a topic for debate. (These discussions continue today in our own Ning community.) Without trying to answer the question definitively, it might be safe to say that reading only for information—which this research privileges–is insufficient. If information reading is all students need, there seems little reason to read literature or to unpack film or to write anything other than information-laden (and often formulaic) essays.

What’s more, much has been written about the unique nature of adolescents’ new literacies practices. Even this study supports the idea that those practices are dramatically different from print-based ones. Not only do students read in nonlinear ways–their eyes likely to zigzag around the screen rather than moving left to right like the hammers of a typewriter–but they read and write other modes: video, music, html code, to name a few. It’s worth noting, too, that the texts read and written online are often done within a social network. Online, audience matters in ways we teachers might struggle to understand. Online texts are public, social, and often collegial.

In the end, the study does emphasize how distinct online and offline reading are.  Its limits seem to be its definition of what constitutes reading, not to mention the types of texts worth reading in schools.

For more information, see:

- Leu, D. J., Zawilinski, L., Castek, J., Banerjee, M., Housand, B. C., Liu, Y., et al. (2007). What is new about the new literacies of online reading comprehension? In L. S. Rush, A. J. Eakle & A. Berger (Eds.), Secondary school literacy: What research reveals for classroom practive. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE.

- The UConn New Literacies Research Team

We might consider four distinct reasons some students continue to struggle with basic reading skills.  According to findings in Research in the Teaching of English this month, some students’ difficulty with reading—even when teachers have instructed and students “know” certain reading strategies—because we as teachers often expect the teaching of strategies to be enough.  It’s not.

In a year-long study, Leigh A. Hall discuses not only strategy approaches, but also issues of identity.  She writes: [The student’s] opportunities to grow and develop as a reader were marginalized in [the teacher’s] classroom both by her teacher and herself.”  First, the emphasis on “cognitive, print-centric view of reading” held by students and teachers.  Second, the identification of the student as a struggling reader by the teacher, that is, the naming of the student as such and engaging with her from that perspective.  Thirdly, the student sought to prevent her classmates from not finding out how bad she was as a reader; so, she didn’t ask for help or take risks in class that might help her grow. Finally, the student and teacher had different goals in mind—academic and social—and the competition between the two only hindered progress.

In our own classrooms, we might consider finding ways to discuss with individual students not only how they struggle with reading skills, but with the way their peers view them, as individuals and as readers.  Other conversations to have, perhaps—with individuals or with classes—might include asking how students’ experiences reading online compare to their offline reading, or, how they have grown and changed as readers throughout their experiences in school.  It seems that one lesson to take from Hall’s study is for teachers of English and literacy to step back from common professional assumptions and open a dialogue with struggling readers about struggling and reading.

Still, my constant concern in the emphasis on literacy skills and reading strategies, over the last several years especially, is that it overshadows other aspects of English education.  For example, what of the possibility for aesthetic experiences with literature?  What of pleasure in reading?  A recent English Companion discussion thread got at just this issue.  One thing it reveals is that “good literature” and “books we like to read” are not at all the same, necessarily.  The discussion–a really rich one at that–might take on even more interesting light if we take it into our classrooms and pose it to our students themselves.

For the full study, see:
Hall, L. A. (2008). Struggling reader, struggling teacher. Research in the Teaching of English, 43(3), 286-309.

For related reading, check out:
Adolescent Literacy: Turning Promise into Practice by Beers, Probst, & Rief

Secondary School Literacy: What Research Reveals for Classroom Practice by Rush, Eakle, and Berger

Literature is losing the fight.  By “the fight” I mean two bookish scuffles: one against literature’s digital counterparts described in Click and Jane, an article in the Times Magazine a couple weeks ago; and the other being a century-old battle in which literature has tried to maintain some place of legitimacy in American education.

As the author (and mother) of Click and Jane notes, her three-year-old son doesn’t mistake her Blackberry for a book.  For him, “the only time he describes what he and I do together as ‘reading’ is when we’re sitting with a clutch of pages bound between covers, open in front of us like a hymnal.”  He enjoys playing on book-like web sites for kids, but he doesn’t dare call it reading.  Importantly, the place of reading literature in schools is becoming increasingly complex as students and researchers spend more time engaged with various new/online literacies.  Things are not looking good for literature.  It’s track record, after all, looks fairly feeble.

Literature in schools hasn’t ever been able to defend itself the way other subjects of study have. Other subjects–physics, Spanish, history, for instance–have specific content and methods that, if push comes to shove, have some practical value. (A student can say, “I can send a man to the moon” or “I can communicate with others” or “I can better partake in the political system”). Utility drives education more often than many educators like to admit.  Students know this, of course.  Their frustrated cries of “Why do we have to do this?” are cries of pragmatists. Education loves pragmatists, so long as they do their work.

Literature isn’t practical. In fact, for much of its teaching in America, teaching literature has been justified under the canopy of Developing Character and Culture.  A weak defense. There is no value in teaching literature. There is worth, perhaps, but not value.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines value as “That amount of some commodity, medium of exchange, etc., which is considered to be an equivalent for something else; a fair or adequate equivalent or return.”  The literary experience is not a commodity.  In fact, attempts to demonstrate the practical or quantifiable value of teaching literature have resulted in its being defined in terms of reading skills or as a necessary companion to writing.  (Incidentally, writing has seldom had so difficult a time finding approval in academia. Programs and departments might argue over whose responsibility it is to teach writing, but none would question the importance of it.)  To this day, the New York State Regents exam as well as the AP Exam in Literature value literature in a particular way.  It is something to be parsed, like a dead frog in biology class.  Poke it. Prod it. Cut it up and discard it.

Worth is different. In addition to definitions of economy and markets, worth also conveys something more: “The character or standing of a person in respect of moral and intellectual qualities; high personal merit or attainments.”  With this definition, we start to approach the unspeakable nature of literary experience.  Words like “moral” and “intellectual” float in the ether.  A teacher would be hard pressed to score morality (though, unfortunately, they might do a more confident job with intellect!).

There is no reason whatsoever to argue for the value of literature.  Nevertheless, schools do indeed have a responsibility to ensure certain practical communication skills are taught.  Why not, then, give literature its own course of study?  Let there be a course on Efferent Reading or Communicative Arts, which focuses on the practical and necessary skills of information gathering, critiquing, and presenting.  Then, separately, study literature with an eye toward the intangible, immeasurable aesthetic effects it can create with imaginative readers.  What would be lost in such a curricular approach?

What’s more, the recent trend of using literature to teach reading skills–or, I would argue, even to emulate authors in students’ own writing–is distinctly non-literary.  It prevents any hope of aesthetic experience or, as Applebee writes in his Tradition and Reform, it privileges students’ experiences with literature instead of their experiences through literature.  Teaching literature resists evaluation, so do the students’ literary experiences through literature.  We read literature, to put it simply, because it’s worth it.

I can’t stop thinking about content and form.  Hardly the thoughts I would choose to have burrowed into the Unforgettable realm of my mind.  But that is exactly where the age-old pair has ensconced themselves.  They will not leave me.  So, I shall escort them out in this posting.  I hope.

In the last two postings, I’ve been trying to make sense of how both Gerald Graff and Laurel Richardson’s views of writing—in terms of content and form—relate to each other.  At first, they seem to be unrelated to me.  Richardson calls for us to consider writing as thinking; to write is to think.  She seems to be responding especially to the notion that in order to write one must know beforehand what one wishes to say.  In addition, Richardson thinks that the forms in which we write help to create knowledge themselves.  There are some things that one might only think of when trying to write a monologue, or in a strict poetic form.  Richardson’s position resists the trend in academia to write in a particular style, an opaque form that makes its content that much harder to understand.  Gerald Graff has a similar view, which he calls Arguespeak—the cryptic language in which scholars speak and write, and a way of communicating in which students are often denied explicit instruction.

Initially, it seems that Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say method of academic writing is in line with Richardson: they propose a form in which students can write, a form that ensures students’ ideas will remain focused and cogent.  But, there is a difference between the Graff-Birkenstein method and Richardson’s call for writing as thinking.  The difference is this: Richardson suggests formal conventions like genre, poetic rhythm, or characterization; the Graff-Birkenstein method gives students the language to think, isolating the core of a student’s idea.  This distinction is important because it sheds light on the inadequacy of my terms, content and form.  And especially form.  What is the difference between the conventional form of a genre—lyric poetry, for example—and the providing of (some) exact language with which students should think?  What effect does thinking in someone else’s sentences have on students’ own thoughts?  While it might ensure that they preserve cogency, how will it effect aspects of writing like voice, for example?

To be clear, Graff and Birkenstein suggest that after students master the basic idea—how to weave others’ ideas into their own—they are free to alter templates to be more original.  In this sense, the Graff-Birkenstein method is one way to train students to think a certain kind of way—a way that does not come easily to some (or many) students.  This is said with great clarity by two graduate students at University of Wisconsin-Madison who, addressing a colleague’s concern that the They Say/I Say method is too formulaic, write: “It seemed to us that our colleague had conflated Graff and Birkenstein’s transparency with a sort of rote, mechanistic method of learning that reduced the complexity of writing to a set of skills that could be grasped and implemented easily.” I agree.  (I wonder if I myself, in my first previous few postings, have fallen into this trap of rash opinion-making: mistaking clarity for glibness; treating content and form so separately; suggesting that Graff was either an education or and English professor.) As with most tools and methods, this one could be of great value to the writing teacher.  That is, as long as it is one tool among others.  A course in which this is the only way of writing—or, a teacher who teaches it as the “right” way, the only way—would be limiting students to only one way of thinking and expressing ideas.  And, unfortunately, as often happens when administrators wish to implement standardized pedagogy, it is quite possible that what would be a valuable tool might be misused as a magic wand.  This is precisely what happened with 6-Traits of Writing, Reading/Writing Workshops, and even Do Nows.  They Say/I Say is a valuable way to help students organize their ideas.  But, administrators must remember the most important word of that sentence: a.

This week, when Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan was questioned by Congress for approval, Senator Lisa Murkowski commented on Duncan’s son, who was conspicuously reading a book behind his father.  The New York Times noted that Murkowski commented  she was “glad to see that your boy is there reading books instead of playing with an electronic gadget.”  This must be addressed.  Did Mr. Duncan say nothing in response in defense of new literacies, or at least the complexity of literacy in the 21st century?

I imagine him responding, “Actually, Senator, electronic gadgets represent a new path in literacy.  Though we might think of them as senseless gizmos, there is much research that suggests we don’t actually know how such devices affect the mind.  James Paul Gee’s research suggests that video games, for example, can offer educators insight into the way the mind learns.  Donald Leu’s research on the way students read online versus on paper suggests that there is no simple correlation: skills in one does not translate into the other.  Elizabeth Birr Moje’s research questions the relationship between out-of-school literacy practices and in-school literacy practices.  In fact, if my son was sitting there reading Twilight on Amazon’s Kindle, I can’t imagine criticizing his reading device simply because it was electronic.”

He didn’t say this, of course.  Perhaps politics dictates such hearings as the wrong time to pontificate.  My worry is whether or not he wanted to say this?

Sociologist Laurel Richardson thinks that writing itself is a form of inquiry.  For her, writing is not something you do only after you have figured out what you want to say.  Writing is how you think it.  In a chapter on writing as a form of inquiry (Richardson, 2000), Richardson writes that “by writing in different ways, we discover new aspects of our topic and our relationship to it. Form and content are inseparable” (923).   Qualitative research, she thinks, is boring.  As a result, research doesn’t get read and has no impact on the field, let alone the world.  Richardson’s tone seems hopeful when she writes that qualitative research “could be reaching wide and diverse audiences, not just devotees of individual topics or authors.  It seems foolish at best, and narcissistic and wholly self-absorbed at worst, to spend months or years doing research that ends up not being read and not making a difference to anything but the author’s career” (924).  Both Graff and Eagleton would nod their heads to this in agreement.

Richardson then goes on to describe how the wide gap between content and form came to be.  She points to the 17th century, where the “world of writing [was] divided into two separate kinds: literary and scientific” (925).  Literature became synonymous with falsehood, science with truth.  What’s more, literary writing became associated with flowery poetry while science was plain and to the point.  Despite changes in 20th century, the distinction still remains mostly intact.  This is certainly the case in education where any research done in the era of No Child Left Behind must be “science-based” (Lewis & Moorman, 2007).  Richardson concludes the chapter with a series of writing exercises and tips for graduate students and other qualitative researchers.

The Richardson you read above, however, was not always so innovative.  Her dissertation (Richardson [Walum], 1963), for examples, reads like the voiceless template writing Graff advocates. Richardson begins her dissertation, “The major concern of this thesis is the explication and testing of a theory in the sociology of knowledge. Empirically, it is a study of the relationship between production of pure mathematics and social sanctions” (1).  Her voice is frigid.  There is no “I” here.  And it doesn’t get better.  Her introductory paragraph ends with the liveliness of a funeral march: “The thesis concludes with a summary of the theoretical orientations, procedures, and findings.  The major contributions are assessed and suggestions for future research are presented” (3).  Presented?  By whom?  As we continue, in the third paragraph of Chapter II, there is some sign of life: she uses the word my.  All at once there is a sense of Laurel Richardson, that she’s wriggled loose of academe’s suffocating grip.  Before reading her small possessive adjective, you wondered if a human being wrote this at all.  That simple two-letter word invites you into her page.  That is, until she follows my with: “orientation is not to the construction of a master conceptual scheme wherein all sociological concepts are integrated into a systemic whole” (4).  Richardson of 2000 wouldn’t know Richardson of 1963 if she, well, looked in a mirror.

The point of the juxtaposition between early and late Richardson isn’t to suggest the researcher a hypocrite.  Rather, it’s to temper her recent ideas with a harsh academic reality: breaking the rules of academic writing is not as simple as it seems.  There are times in young scholars’ careers when playing by the rules is necessary for advancing.  When Richardson wrote for her three-person committee at University of Colorado, she pretended like she had never even heard of form, let alone style.  Importantly, Richardson has chronicled at length (Richardson, 1997) the struggles she has faced trying to get her work accepted by others in her field.  Her representations of research as poems and plays are gleefully received by some, but woefully read by others who see her work as nearer a wordy prank than scholarship.

It is with great caution that a young scholar bends the accepted forms of academic writing.  There are resources available and pockets of alternative-minded professors out there, but young careers are fragile things.  Both Graff and Richardson are well established in their careers; they can write however their scholarly hearts desire.  They can also encourage their advisees to break the rules, if they like.  But graduate students beware: you do so at you own risk.

Part 4 to come soon…

It’s not only a handful of scholars who treasure content over form. Content runs amok throughout academia. In his book Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind, Gerald Graff (Graff, 2004) describes how the school system—universities especially, but also secondary schools—has become an exclusivist system only concerned with the perpetuation of itself. He draws attention to the problems of academic disciplines, the gibberish with which scholars speak about their scholarship, and the way in which students are forced to play a game of insincere studentship just to get through school. Unlike his contemporary Stanley Fish, who thinks that scholarship is an end unto itself and that’s the way it should be (Fish, 2008)—Graff thinks that scholars have a responsibility to make their work accessible to non-academics. Not dumbed-down, but accessible.

Students suffer because academics yatter with only other academics in mind. In what he calls the Law of Relative Invisibility of Intellectual Differences, Graff (Graff, 2004) claims that “to the non-egghead, any two eggheads, no matter how far apart, are virtually indistinguishable” (7). Despite this yen for elitism, Graff describes how intellectualism creeps into popular culture with greater and greater frequency. College-educated audiences crave intelligent entertainment. In addition, “academic ideas are increasingly popularized, not only by the media but by academic writing itself, as university presses court the wider audiences of trade houses while trade houses increasingly publish academics” (19). So, not only is the populous craving intellectualism, the universities are craving the masses.

Graff then goes on to reveal to us “one of the most closely guarded secrets that academia unwittingly keeps from students” (21). He calls it Arguespeak. For Graff, much of scholarship is a matter of making arguments. But, because students don’t know this secret, they flounder about trying to decode their instructors’ magic spells. He goes on to write that “the first step toward demystifying academia is to start being more explicit about the academic centrality of persuasive argument” (22). Academic culture is more like a volleyball game in which an idea gets tossed back and forth between players. Students, however, don’t see academics played this way because “the game is fractured into so many unconnected courses and subjects that it drops out of sight” (27). Graff sets out to change that.

In response to the popularity of Clueless in Academe, Graff and his wife wrote a guide to academic writing (Graff & Birkenstein, 2005) called They Say / I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. The writing manual lays out a series of templates for students to adopt and adapt in their writing. The templates, the authors argue, help ensure that students frame their own ideas in response to the thoughts of others’, thereby ensuring that Arguespeak is at the center of their own writing. For example, one template might look like this: While some say Shakespeare’s plays are _____________, I think Shakespeare’s plays are ________________. By writing within this template, a student is sure to frame his ideas in terms of others’.

This is where Graff’s astute point about the opacity of the academy starts to wobble. His template method for academic writing ensures students’ ideas are cogent at the expense of the craft of writing itself. He pries apart thinking and writing/content and form, isolating the former and relinquishing the latter. He seems to think that content and form are distinct, that writing and thinking are unrelated. This might be fine with him. There are others, however, for whom writing and thinking are very much conflated.

Part 3 to come next week…

Somewhere in the doctoral process graduate students learn to write like scholars.  They realize that in order to get published or to receive the accolades of their discipline they must write a certain way.  It’s as if there exists a secret scroll on which is penned the sacred law of academic writing: Write to convey only content and do not fall prey to the seduction of form.  If readers are bored, that is their fault.  If readers think they understand you they are mistaken and only have a pedestrian comprehension at best.  To be a scholar, we are taught, is to write opaquely.  Fortunately, the saving grace of scholarship is this: it is only read by other scholars, anyway.

In his book Figures of Dissent (Eagleton, 2003), Terry Eagleton criticizes two theorists on this point.  Post-colonial theorist Gayatri Spivak, Eagleton claims, ignores her readers in the name of her own intellect: “Post-colonial theorists are often to be found agonizing about the gap between their own intellectual discourse and the natives of whom they speak; but the gap might look rather less awesome if they did not speak a discourse which most intellectuals, too, find unintelligible” (159).  Who, after all, would write a sentence that reads, “many of us are trying to carve out positive negotiations with the epistemic graphing of imperialism” (ibid)?  Spivak’s most fanatic reader is likely Spivak herself.  Eagleton’s criticism also extends to Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom.  “It would be charitable”, writes Eagleton, “to think that Bloom writes as slackly and cackhandedly as he does because he is out to attract the general reader. He is admirably intent of rescuing literature from the arcane rituals of US academia and restoring it to a wider audience.  Even so, you cannot help suspecting that this rambling, platitudinous stuff is the best he can now muster” (169).   In both cases, the scholars’ pens drip pretentiousness.  It’s no wonder graduate students end up writing like windbags, Eagleton might say.  Windbags are all they know.

Eagleton is not alone.  In a review of a now popular work in critical geography (Soja, 1996), Andy Merrifield criticizes the book’s ideas and the stylelessness of the author, Edward Soja.  After trashing several core ideas from the book, Merrifield adds that “maybe the real problem here is Soja’s prose.  It is far too remote and wordy, and often screams out for clear-spoken directness.  His verbosity militates against him really getting down deep, really immersing himself in the convulsions of daily life and in the cracks and marginal twilight zone of urban life. This is where his Thirdspace [theory] resides and it is plainly where he wants to be, but he cannot quite stoop that low” (347).  Ideas are only part of scholarship; the way in which ideas are presented is equally vital.  What do we call that “way in which ideas are presented”?  Some might call it form, others style or representation.  Since content and form are a well-known twosome, we’ll keep them together.

To be continued next week…

Check out my new article on re-reading books with 10th grade students and the accompanying unit plan at readwritethink.org.

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?

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.