I Need Feminism Because

Anyone who's been spending a good deal of time on the internet (or, at least, most of the corners of the internet I tend to frequent) has probably seen the "I need feminism because..." meme. It's pretty fantastic, really, with some really amazing, illustrative reasons for why this movement exists. The photograph ones are especially poignant:

But today I want to share my own personal notes after something that happened on Purdue's campus. Walking back from a theater performance, I was getting nervous because it was dark and (once I passed Heavilon) I was alone. To make things even worse, it was raining and I'd actually taken off my glasses because I could see better without them than I could with them getting rain-speckled (...which is to say, I couldn't see at all, but at least there were recognizable shapes). 

As I got to a darker part of campus (across from one of the frat houses, which only aggravated my nervousness), I found myself walking behind two older men. They were obviously middle aged, and obviously (from their conversation) coming from the same show I'd just seen. All in all, they were pretty unthreatening. So, when it became obvious we were heading in the same direction, I confirmed that they were, in fact, heading to the same parking garage.

Me: "Oh, great! I really hate walking alone after dark."

Guy: "Of course. You can join us. Our wives (who were walking about a block behind, chatting) won't mind."

....and then he tried to put his arm around me. 

I'd like to say he meant it as a protective gesture, but he very obviously didn't (his tone was highly suggestive, if only jokingly) and, regardless, it was a completely inappropriate move. I'd just expressed the fact that I was feeling vulnerable. The last thing I wanted was to be touched, and he was the last person who would have had the right.

Nothing happened. I say this to reassure friends and family, rather than to dismiss how much this bothered me. We walked to the garage in an awkward gaggle, I quickly got in my car, and I drove home. The end. But it's been two days and I can't forget it.

I also can't forget the fact that, as the rain started, I had the thought that "Well, I should be safer now, because no one is going to want to assault someone in this...."

....I need feminism, because I shouldn't have to tell someone to keep their hands to themselves when

1. They are a stranger
2. I am vulnerable
3. I have blatantly said I feel worried about being victimized

I need feminism, because I shouldn't have to factor weather systems into my ability to walk safely.

I need feminism, because so many women are not as lucky as me and have had to deal with more than an inappropriate side-hug.

And I need feminism, because I'm sitting here, getting ready to post this, and wondering whether it will be seen as overreacting.

But I'm posting it anyway.

Rhetorical Canons in a Digital Age

It's no secret that I love technical rhetoric. I can lose hours debating the ins and outs of social networking. I enjoy the finer points of web design. I dabble in coding with html or css, spend way too many hours playing video games, write as part of online communities, and always seek ways to drag these influences into the classroom.

While getting my MA, it also wasn't a secret that a large contingency of my institution's English Department were wary--if not altogether hostile--towards the ever-creeping reach of technology. For them, technology was (and is) a thing to be feared. It is complicated and superficial, difficult to master and even more difficult to teach. It changes constantly, while preserving things well beyond when they should expire.

This animosity (understandable as it is), is why I appreciate articles like James E. Porter's "Recovering Delivery for Digital Rhetoric." Because, for Porter, digital writing and rhetoric isn't just about exploring a new, exciting frontier. It's also about recovering classical elements of rhetoric that, once lost, cost women, people of color, and other marginalized identities greatly (211). As the focus of rhetoric instruction shifted from orality and narration to informational writing, certain forms of understanding and relating to the world around us (such as verbal communication, storytelling, cultural connections, and oral memory) were devalued. And (surprise, surprise), the forms of understanding that were still "respectable" were almost exclusively those accessible to white, heterosexual, wealthy men (Welch, 1994).

This, however, is not a discourse on the evils of marginalization. Rather, it's a celebration of Porter's simple but encouraging acknowledgement that--with the continuing growth of digital rhetorics--these types of "knowing" have ample opportunity to reclaim their place.

Online discourse is written discourse, true. But it also carries a lot of the hallmarks of oral language. It is responsive and fluid. It is often community driven. And it's physical presentation (whether its through bodily representations of the communicator or the style and accessibility of the text's platform) plays an incredibly important role, hearkening back to the long subjugated canon of delivery.

House of Leaves... not your typical text experience.

This isn't to say that delivery doesn't matter in print texts. It does. But the delivery styles are almost always standardized. They follow relatively similar formats. They demand a certain approach and expectations from readers. Very few challenge these norms (though texts like Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves do exist). 

But the Internet doesn't fall into such standard categories. Digital writing isn't so much a genre as it is a medium, encapsulating an enormous range of audiences, forums, styles, and purposes. And while technology creates certain barriers of access that still perpetrate existing class lines, it also offers new forms of accessibility to those who had been previously barred. Because of digital writing's aural quality, its' ties to delivery are more readily apparent. And, as Porter explains, "A robust canon of delivery should help us think more productively about how we are writing, and to whom, and lead us to make smarter choices as writers/designers, whether we are producing online information or non-digital information" (211).

Making a Withdrawal - Stepping Away from the Banking Method of Education.

I think I might be in love with Paulo Freire.

He wouldn't be my first academic love (an odd and eclectic category that includes C.S. Lewis, Cicero, and--perhaps most embarrassingly--James Paul Gee). While I would never claim that Freire's style in any way resembles theirs (or that theirs resemble each other's), one thing they do all have in common is their ability to craft beautiful, and elegantly simple prose. They take things I hold dear, and they illuminate them with language that is engaging--sometimes even stunning--and yet still easy to understand. With Lewis, it's Christianity. With Cicero, it's the nature of discourse itself. And with Gee and Freire....it's students.

Freire's exploration of the banking model of education (where students are simply vessels where instructors "deposit" knowledge until they are full) strikes to the core of a lesson I've been slowly learning the more that I teach. The traditional education system is a top-down affair. The teacher is the authority. The students are subjects. As I have told students time and again, the classroom is not a democracy.

But what Freire points out--and what I'm realizing I really believe--is that, however true that is, it's not okay. Or, at the very least, it's a system that needs to be made visible.

So often, instructors of college freshmen lament their "inability" to exercise critical thought. They rail against students caught in the nets of five paragraph essays, stringent page requirements, and the ever cliched transitions of "First....secondly....and in conclusion..." Yet what they don't acknowledge is that, given our current system of education, to expect anything else is ludicrous. As Freire points out:

The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them. (73)

In other words, our students spend years learning how to memorize and regurgitate "knowledge" on command. They learn to adapt to a system. And it's especially evident in our "good" students (which, of course, we find en mass in college settings)...because these are the ones who learned how to play the game without making waves. They don't challenge the system, because they've learned that this is something that's frowned upon. They don't question the teacher, because that way leads to danger and stress and bad grades. They have learned to be vessels.

It's a system that I hate, and yet I know I have also done my time as one of of the "well-intentioned bank-clerk teachers who do not realize that they are only serving to dehumanize" (75). I generally am an open book. I wear my emotions on my sleeve, and I'm quick to share my opinions....and when I occupy a position of authority (as I do every day in the classroom), those seemingly harmless opinions become law. And this remains just as true when I walk in with naive ideas of instilling a social justice-esque curriculum, if my means of doing so follows the banking method. Well-intentioned or not, if I simply inform my students of "how the world is," I am part of the problem. "[true humanists] cannot use banking educational methods in the pursuit of liberation, for they would only negate that very pursuit. Nor may a revolutionary society inherit these methods from an oppressor society" (78).

I share my opinions with my class. I feel that, risky as it is, it's more dishonest to pretend to be utterly objective. But I try to remember that "liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals [sic] of information" (79). My job is not to inform my students how they should view the world. My job is to get them to start thinking about it...to start questioning the systems that have been invisible to them and which they've taken for granted.

I might not like the conclusions they come to. But that's the point. Their agreement with me means nothing if I never give them a chance to not.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Theory, Practice, and the Written Word: Or Working Around My Grudge With Academese

It's no secret that I have a grudge against poorly written academic texts ("poorly written" here meaning writing that makes my eyes glaze over and my brain cringe from jargon). I've written about it before, ranted publicly many a time, and I undoubtedly will again.

But however much I rail against an overabundance (in my opinion) of academese, I appreciate those moments when I get called out on exactly what I'm railing against.

It's true that a great deal of academic writing is overwrought. I'm guilty of this, myself (my MA thesis was an embarrassing collection of passive sentences and convoluted paragraphs filled with agonizing prose). It's an easy pitfall in a world where passive structures imply objectivity. Drowning in deadlines, publication requirements, and way too much caffeine, we have limits to what we can manage. If a piece is grammatically correct, understandable (if only barely), and a publisher is actually willing to take it....does it really matter if it's a bit heavy handed?

I'd say yes. My goal for my writing and my scholarship is communication. Clarity. Scholarship that is drowning in academese places a barrier between theory and reader, lessening the audience who can actually be impacted. If I want my research to make waves, I need it to be the kind of thing that people come back to willingly. Not the kind that graduate students reluctantly trudge through, thoughts of bonfires dancing in the back of their thoughts, before shoving it into a pile of other quickly-forgotten texts. I long to emulate scholars like James Paul Gee, Nancy Sommers, or Wendy Bishop; I want my research to be practical, applicable, and ultimately readable.

But my desire for clarity and engagement comes at a cost...one that Gary Olson and Kory Lawson Ching have expressed so, so well. In his essay, "Struggling Over Theory, Struggling Over Identity," Olson comments on the role of theory in composition. "I did not argue that everyone should engage in [theoretical] scholarship, or that we should abandon other types of scholarship (such as explorations of effective pedagogy), or that theoretical scholarship should be thought of as superior to alternative modes of investigation--only that as a field we need to widen, not narrow, our intellectual focus" (584). Ching, too, points out the great weakness hidden under all my railing--"to be constantly shooting for [practical] payoff is to privilege, in the parlance of composition, the product over the process" (456).

I know that my own practical knowledge of teaching and praxis has improved drastically since my return to grad school. I was a good teacher before, yes, but studying theory over the past three years (even the theory that left me writhing in mental anguish) has challenged me to question long-held beliefs, to find new ways to interact with my cohort and my students, and to grow...as an instructor and a student. Ching and Olson, in beautifully clear terms, remind me that abstract thought can often only be expressed in abstractions... and it has to start there (and be allowed to stay there) before any move toward practice can feasibly occur. It has to be valued in its gestation.

And, speaking in terms of pragmatics, there's the very real truth that the Academy (with all the ominous, anonymous authority the capital A ascribes) values theory and intellectual complexity. Ching references Sidney Dobrin when he says that without theory "composition scholarship will stagnate, and composition as a field will be defined within the narrow confines of a service orientation (emphasis mine)" (458). Teaching may be what brought me to this field, but the pedagogical imperative (if all-encompassing) becomes a constraint that can hinder our effectiveness as a field or even--equally--as teachers. "We risk invisibility and illegitimacy, and those attributes would have dire consequences for the field as a whole" (458).

My bias will probably always be towards practicality. I like personalized, witty, or practical scholarship. I like things I can hold in my hands and turn into something real. But what I want (however valuable) can't be the be all and end all of the discipline.

Anyone who has taught figures out very quickly that sharing ideas is the best way to plan. We pass lesson plans back and forth. We talk about strategies and approaches and we develop them into new, personalized things. It's a lesson that I am trying to get better about applying to my scholarly life as well. It's not enough to stick to the knowledge that I'm most comfortable with. I need theorists in my life. I need other view points. They make me a better teacher, a better scholar, and a better person... and that is valuable enough.

Learning to Listen

I remember student teaching. I was a senior at Olivet Nazarene University...a tiny little bubble of a community, tucked away from the rest of the world. In many ways, it was an idealistic haven. It was a world of praying problems away, worship times (mandatory--every Tuesday and Wednesday), (mostly) white skin, (mostly) middle-class, and an enthusiastic promise of changing the world.

And then there was Kennedy Jr. High.

Stepping into that room, I was the only white face besides my cooperating teacher. My students--23 fifth graders with fidgeting hands and shifting eyes--dealt with things I had never even dreamed of. They came to class after a morning break-in. They went on visits to the nearby prison to see parents or uncles or cousins. They struggled with bladder infections when their parents refused (yes...refused) to take them to the doctor. And they rolled their eyes through remedial test-taking strategies that were necessary because over half of the class had IEPs, and we didn't have enough manpower to diversify the curriculum. I can't think of a time that was more difficult in my teaching career....or a time when my struggle mattered less.

It's an experience that broke me more times than I can count, right before building me back up. I'm beyond grateful for that opportunity...and it's what sits in the back of my mind as I read things like Damian Baca's The Chicano Codex, Richard Ohmann's Reflections on Class and Language, or Jaqueline Jones Royster's When the First Voice You Hear Isn't Your Own. It's the lesson (or lessons) that linger as I wade through James Paul Gee's work on becoming a part of a discourse community. Because it's my reminder that these concepts--couched in the now-familiar jargon of pedagogy, terministic screens, rhetorical situation and sovereignty--are so much more than academic, theoretical constructs.

They are 23 faces, hungry and bored and waiting for recess because the math makes no sense to them. They're 32 middle schoolers who don't understand why "Reading Workshop" should be considered an elective and who are convinced they hate reading. And they are 30 freshman from the Chicago-land area, some of whom have only just finished the remedial CHANCE course before nervously wading into college-level English.

It would be easy for me--a white, middle class, educated woman--to make assumptions and claims about class and race and socioeconomic factors. I can talk about lenses and strategies. But I don't want to. I don't feel that I have the right. Because I've been teaching these "at-risk" students for years, now. I've been interacting with them on a daily basis. And they have shown me, first hand, that "[we] do not simply and eternally belong to [a] class. Rather, in all [our] doings from day to day, [we and everyone we are affected by] constantly create [our] class position" (Ohmann, 11). They, like bell hooks, might say "[I find it] a necessary aspect of self-affirmation not to feel compelled to choose on voice over another, not to claim one as more authentic, but rather to construct social realities that celebrate, acknowledge, and affirm differences, variety" (2). My students have their home voices. They have their street voices. They have their work voices. And they have their classroom voices. Sometimes these overlap. Sometimes they don't. But what I'm learning more and more is that I don't want to be the kind of teacher who doesn't hear what my students are saying because it doesn't fit into a specific, "accepted" discourse.

I have opinions. I can be very vocal about them. But on issues of race and class, I think I would much, much rather listen.

hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston: South End, 1989.
Ohmann, Richard. "Reflections on Class and Language." College English,44(1), 1982. 1-17.

Processing Post-Process

It's not hard to understand why the Process Method became the dominant approach to teaching writing. A focus on "correctness" led to composition becoming a subject of remediation, rather than pride. Process changed that. It valued the stops and starts of writing in all its stages. It embraced imperfections and sloppy transference and the idea that imperfect didn't mean bad. Freshman Composition was still seen as a place of preparation, but Process instruction focused more on preparing students to think than on how to correct. As Peter Elbow says in Everyone Can Write, "I cannot teach students the particular conventions they will need for particular disciplines, but I can teach students the principle of discourse variation. ... I can't teach them the forms they'll need, but I can sensitize them to the notion of differences in form so [they]... will pick them up faster when they encounter them" (253).

The whole point of Process instruction was that focusing on the end product was detrimental to students. Even if they could write the perfect Lit Review or Research Paper, that knowledge left them utterly unprepared for the types of writing they would encounter in other disciplines (their disciplines) if they didn't understand the process that got them there. And focusing on process, rather than product, allowed teachers to reclaim a position of pride. "The teacher gets a new role by this shift of criteria from truth and good style to effect" (Elbow, A Method for Teaching Writing). They become a facilitator who teaches students how to learn, rather than an editor or drillmaster "fixing" bad writing.

The hope of the Process method was that the responsibility for learning and "good" writing would be on students' shoulders. They would become self-motivated. After all, they were focusing on their thoughts. Their ideas. Their processes. Their audiences. Surely they'd care about the outcome, right?

The problem is that the answer is a resounding......sometimes. Maybe.

Freshman composition is still a required course, rather than an elective. The teacher is still in a position of authority, and our students still look to us for the "right" answer. Process means understanding that there are many roads that lead to the same destination...but for students who are unfamiliar with a task, it's easy to believe that the process they learn in the classroom (often the teacher's preferred writing process) is the only process out there.

Enter post-process....which, at first, can feel as obscure and inaccessible as so many of the posts (post-modernism, post-materialism, post-structuralism, etc...). Advocates seem to disagree wildly on just how and why the process method is flawed: from Thomas Kent who would like to pitch it all out--bathwater and the baby, too-- to Bruce McComiskey who sees post-process as a continuation of what process started.

My largest problem with Post-Process theorists (at least as far as I understand them) isn't that they see a problem. They're concerned about students writing the perpetual "My Summer Vacation" essay, or the focus on a single process cutting out different learning styles, or the fact that self-centered writing ignores the fact that culture, society, and context drastically change what and how we write. And, I agree, these are all issues. But, to me, the problem isn't that process ignores these things. Not necessarily.

The problem is that process, taught badly, ignores these things.

Starting with personal knowledge means nothing until you can explain why anyone else should listen. You can't understand your own rhetorical exigence until you understand how that exigence is formed by the culture around you...such as why so many of our students want to write about the general, hot-button topics that they've heard their parents argue. It's not that they can't think for themselves. And it's not that they, themselves, are always affected by the issue. But they are affected by their parents caring. They are affected by their social circles talking about these things. And they react to those discussions, wanting to join in with something familiar and, obviously, important to the people around them.

My issue with Post-Process isn't that it's wrong. It's that I feel like it's the same thing...just done better. Which is to say, I don't have an issue with it at all. I just don't see why we're fighting to begin with.

All the things she said...and he said....and me.

If recent proposals for legislation over copyright tell us nothing else, they tell us (clearly) that authorship has become increasingly complex in our digital age. Or, perhaps, has simply made that complexity very, very visible.

It's a conflict that instructors and students know well. Our school charters and handbooks come equipped with plagiarism policies and our course syllabai detail the penalties of violating them. Instructors stress originality, individual voice, and creativity....while asking students to include an increasing number of outside sources in their work. These are important lessons--knowledge doesn't exist in a vacuum. We prove that we know what we know by engaging in conversations with others in those fields. Verbally or visually, that means acknowledging the other communicators that are out there and then having them respond to us and to each other.

But what happens when that knowledge is just a hyperlink away? Or when the sheer proliferation of available information makes it difficult to discern between "expert" sources and "amateurs?"

Accusations of plagiarism in the composition classroom are loaded. Instructors often feel violated when they receive plagiarized works, as if these texts somehow reflect a students' character or opinion of the instructor. Students plagiarize because they are lazy, disrespectful, inattentive, or (to be horribly politically incorrect) "dumb." In fact, a lot of the things instructors say about plagiarism seem to echo the attitudes Joseph Williams describes towards grammatical errors in his essay "The Phenomenology of Error." Responding to critical language regarding poor grammar, Williams says:

The last thing I want to seem is sanctimonious. But...what happens in Cambodia and Afghanistan could more reasonably be called horrible atrocities. The likes of Idi Amin qualify as legitimate oafs. Idiots we have more than enough of in our state institutions. And while simply [sic] illiteracy is the condition of billions, it does not characterize those who use disinterested in its original sense (152).

In many ways, I'd say instructor responses to plagiarism follow a very similar line. Intellectual theft is a serious crime...but how many of our students are truly operating under the intent of claiming someone else's work as their own? In amateur works, uncertainties and incomplete understanding about citation and "proper" research can lead to shortcuts or mistakes that, to all intents and purposes, look like plagiarism.

Jim Ridolfo and Danielle DeVoss take a different approach towards information appropriation. For them, research becomes a matter of remixing old information into something new. In other words, "[r]emixing—or the process of taking old pieces of text, images, sounds, and video and stitching them together to form a new product—is how individual writers and communities build common values; it is how composers achieve persuasive, creative, and parodic effects. Remix is perhaps the premier contemporary composing practice." In order for them to approach writing as a remix, however, Ridolfo and Devoss stress that instructors need to get rid of the idea that remix is simply cutting and pasting, or that this process is restricted only to music. Remixing is any type of composition where something new is created from bits and pieces of other works that have either been recontextualized and/or modified by the new "author." 

Remixing and composition can be a tricky subject. Blatant intellectual theft is a problem and those distinctions need to be explored. But viewing research and research papers as remixes of other information allows us to participate in the idea of diaspora that Paul Butler explores in his article "Style in the Diaspora of Composition Studies." By viewing knowledge as shared and transformable, it opens the possibility for solid research in multiple genres, styles, and mediums.