Progress Report

The class is progressing in ways that are surprising me. For starters, there’s the whole new group dynamic, which seems to have woken some students up and to have raised others to new heights. If the opening groups were “safe” in all the unproductive ways, these groups are “dangerous” in all the useful ways—that is, the thinking and analyzing these groups are doing could be dangerous to the powers that be. Inside the groups, there is a great deal of negotiating meaning. The students have lost whatever inhibitions they may have had about questioning each other and asking for clarification. In addition, the groups are keeping their members up to speed on the readings and the concepts found within them.

And that’s the next surprising thing—the extent to which the students can employ the strategies laid out by Gee. Not everyone—but a solid majority. And that majority seems very capable of helping the others stay on top of things.

In Friday’s class, we looked at The Academic Bill of Rights that comes from David Horowitz’s organization, Students for Academic Freedom. Just a side note—and something to go along with an earlier post—there was a time I would have foregrounded the presentation of this text with some snarky remarks or something. I didn’t here, and I think that’s for the best. Now this isn’t to say that students are deaf to my political leanings—they can’t be if they’re paying attention. And certainly the context-of-situation for the class is such that they could probably guess some of my reactions to the text. But my reactions were never the central point of the class. I tried to let the students respond to the text AND each other—not to me. And that kind of de-centering is becoming easier and easier with this class. In other courses I might not have been able to resist making the session about my reactions. Here, though, the students take the examples I bring in and run away with them.

The ABoR is interesting because the numbered “rights” are fine—it’s the context in which the “rights” are explained that’s in question. The rights are worded vaguely and, dare I say, neutrally enough that it’s easy to see them as creating some parameters for the academic enterprise. But taken in the context of SFAF, the ABoR reads like whine list. And that’s the beauty of the document—it enables itself to be taken out of its primary context and dropped into other contexts. I could go on, but I’d like read comments on this instead.

I’m going to spend the next few days writing about the DAJs and the group assessments. I’ve got the grades in for both, and I need to reflect on the data and see what it means for class activities. I’m hoping to put together a mid-term survey and to conduct some mid-term interviews with students.

Paging Dr. Phil

How does Dr. Phil wield his power? That was essentially the question at the center of the class today. The groups discussed briefly their understanding of discourse models (which I keep calling cultural models, despite Gee’s sound reasoning for not doing so) and then launched into analyses of a Dr. Phil column from a recent Oprah magazine. My question to the groups was this: what discourse models are at work in the column? As they worked, I tweaked that question by pointing out that Dr. Phil is working within the established genre of advice columns, which itself is an established part of the genre of women’s magazines.

What impressed me today was how quickly these groups got to work and how seriously they took the task at hand. It would have been easy not to do either. That is, in a class where my authority is lessened by a group-driven participation policy, a lack of an attendance policy, and no system of quizzes or other check points, the students could choose to fake it. But as I walked around the room, I saw people who looked like they actually enjoyed talking to each other about Dr. Phil’s penchant for playing the psychological mechanic—y’know, Mr. Fix-it. My larger point here is that I witnessed students engaging each other in what appeared to be friendly and cooperative ways—and these conversations made good use of the terms presented by Gee. And they also made good use of the students’ own observations of the world they’re living in. These analyses were grounded in immediate contexts and informed by the students’ past experiences with the genres.

Perhaps Dr. Phil is too easy a mark? Certainly one could argue that he works in an overly-constructed or overly-determined genre. To me, that’s the point. A genre such as his needs critiquing for the very cultural (or discourse) models it assumes and presents. Dr. Phil's power comes from the cultural models that establish him as an authority.

The students today demonstrated today something I’ve been believing for some time now—the text isn’t the issue. The reading/discussing process is. I know that sounds obvious, but juxtapose that statement with the curricula established by English departments around the country. We’ve fetishized the text and we expect our students to do the same. And when they don’t, we imagine their refusal as failure or deficiency.

Let’s talk about that.

It Takes Village People

Yesterday the students changed groups, and the change seemed to have brought a whiff of fresh air to the class. The first groups were formed geographically, so to speak, in that the students turned around and grouped with the people closest to them—which for at least 3 of the groups meant that the members already knew each other. These new groups forced the students to move around the class and to introduce themselves to new people. My observation is that many of the students took the change as an opportunity to hear new perspectives and to re-present themselves to others.

Before the change, the students turned in their peer assessment forms, which used a Leikert scale with statements about their partners’ group participation. I haven’t read them closely yet, but my initial response is that students are nice and honest—in that order. My own assessment of some students’ work in the groups would have been different from their partners, and I’m guessing two things: students don’t want to damage each other, and they don’t have much experience assessing things.

The first thing I can’t change, and I’m not sure I would want to. Students really are “in it together,” in that many classes present a teacher v. students approach. Or maybe it’s that students perceive the class that way—and surely the media helps with that perception. These students have to live with each other (literally, in some cases), and who wants to play the role of fuddy duddy by dissing a peer. The social nature of the classroom is under-appreciated in a lot of what we think we know about student behavior.

The second thing—assessment experience—I can do something about. I might have the class discuss what it means to agree, somewhat agree, or disagree with statements about the performance of others. We should talk more about what we expect from our peers. (Suggestions?) In general, we need to think more about the extent to which the class becomes a community.

Maybe that’s the larger point to this post. Is it reasonable to expect a college class to become a community? And what would that mean? Critical pedagogy—even in the way I’m presenting it—assumes (there’s that word again) that learning is a community-based event. But doesn’t the whole assessment fetish and the general discourse surrounding higher education work against that assumption?

I’m at a loss for more right now. Clearly, more work to be done.

Suggestions?

With Apologies to AG

America, there are green tea leaves
in your eyes, cigarette smoke
across your cheeks.
Are you queasy, America?
Was it something you ate?
The salad? The appetizer plate?
America, Applebees is calling you.

We dated in college, America.
When my hair was long in the back.
You liked long hair,
like a river likes its banks,
like a banker likes his banks.
A little Marx went a long way,
you went a long way,
a long way back
to from where you came.

America, your daughters
are not your best friends.
Your sons are not your toys.
America, your wild weekends
aren’t.

America, your thong
is showing.