Of Posters and Progress

I’m getting ready to head to CCCC in Chicago (nothing like geriatric rock), and that means the class won’t be physically meeting till next week. Just enough time off for the students to finish Discipline & Punish (notes are never as good as the real thing).

Let me just say that the poster presentations really impressed me. I’m going to try to take some close-up photos to post. Perhaps I should have asked the students to say a few things about each of their works, but I was really happy with the products they put on display. Even students who have been struggling a bit with the course material pulled it together for this project.

And all this tells me a few things that support some of my general ideas about education. First off, students are interested in finding alternative forms for their intellectual work—and alternative audiences. They want to engage each other, and they realize that traditional academic forms don’t help that cause much. Second, connecting course materials to the kinds of texts students encounter all the time creates excellent space for inventiveness and creativity. And smarts. The annotations on the posters were thoughtful and full of voice. These students claimed this assignment in all the ways I hoped they would.

We need to continue to make education about ownership, about what it means to claim one’s own ideas and to thrust them out into the public sphere. Too much of what we do is private and safe. And I understand that we want college to be a place where students can learn without the threat of reprisal and public scorn. But I also understand that education needs to crackle with the nervous energy of engagement.

More soon from the Windy City…

Where's the Disciplining?

They (it’s always them) say that the key to successful blogging is consistency. Yeah.

Anyway, another busy week; this one spent prepping for CCCC in Chicago. Tomorrow the students are presenting their posters in one of the buildings on campus. I’m looking forward to seeing them—and to seeing some of the faculty’s reactions.

With the poster presentations, the focus on individual texts will end. The class will turn to issues of disciplinarity and genre. For example, in class on Wed. we looked at five letters to editors about the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. We talked a great deal about how those five authors defined the event and the government’s responsibilities. The letters help reproduce ideas about the relationships citizens have with their government and with each other. But we didn’t really get into that as much as we discussed how the letters reflected the individual authors’ ideas and political positions. When I get back from the conference, the focus of the class will become one step more abstract as we will begin to discuss how genres like editorials create discourse conventions that define what is normal and acceptable and what is not.

I expect that we’ll start talking a lot about how we as subjects are disciplined by the texts we encounter; how social control is exerted on us via discourses; and how we establish social hierarchies through texts. In short, we’ll be talking about Foucault.

I’m hoping to maintain the de-centered-ness of the class as we move into the heavy theory stuff, but I feel a strong responsibility to make sure the class is working their way through it in appropriate ways—whatever those might be.