Saw this in the New York Times last Sunday.

Losing My Religion, November 1, 2009

MAJORING in the humanities and social sciences puts a damper on religiosity. Thank (or blame) postmodernism, the staple of humanities classes, with its notions of relative truth (opposed to religion’s absolute truth) and questioning authority. “These are arguments that students find persuasive,” says Miles Kimball, an economics professor at the University of Michigan. He and three colleagues analyzed data on the religious attitudes and observance of some 26,000 students across the country over six years.

How important do students think religion is in their lives? For scale, Miles Kimball says, if the difference between the religiosity of people living in the Bible Belt and those in the rest of the country equals 100, then the effect of majoring in a particular subject would be:

-47 Social science
-28 Humanities
-24 Physical science/math
-14 Engineering
-13 Biology
0 No college
+2 Business
+10 Other
+16 Vocational
+23 Education

Not surprising, though I didn’t realize majoring in social science made SUCH a difference (as opposed to humanities). Yep, if you take a postmodern perspective, you’re more likely to focus on social structures as ways of improving the world than on the divine or the spirit.

Also — no matter how many times I read it, I don’t get the thing about “if the difference between the religiosity of people living in the Bible Belt and those in the rest of the country equals 100, then the effect of majoring in a particular subject would be.”  It would seem that would mean that majoring in social science makes a person 47 points closer (i.e., further away from “100″) to the non-Bible Belt population. Anyway, doens’t matter — the scale works without that scale.

Also saw this in the last Sunday’s New York Times: “What Do You See?” Seems could be a good writing assignment, a promising way of getting more interesting essays and avoiding plagiarized / re-hashed topics.

What does a swimming tiger suggest about public policy, or a pricked finger say about your goals? The Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University is showing applicants two dozen conceptual photos, and giving them the option of basing an essay on one of them.

The following photo album was created by the Center for Creative Leadership, a nonprofit group that produces visual tools to prompt conversations at leadership training seminars. Wagner is putting the concept to unusual use as an admissions tool. “It allows us to get a deeper sense of the applicant’s passion for/commitment to an issue, and unlocks the depth of interest in a way that is not always achievable in a standard admissions essay,” says Tracey Gardner, Wagner’s chief of staff.

Another benefit: no more essays rehashed from other applications. About 970 applicants for this fall’s class, more than half, wrote on an image.

Here’s the slideshow, showing a sampling of the images and examples of what students chose to write about.

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all argument, which cannot fail to keep man in everlasting ignorance. That principle is condemnation before investigation.
– Edmund Spenser

He who gives an answer before he hears, it is folly and shame to him.
–Proverbs 18:13

Get at library:

Sullivan, Dale. “Beyond Discourse Communities: Orthodoxies and the Rhetoric of Sectarianism.” Rhetoric Review 18 (1991): 148-164.

PN 171.4

Cancel that — found a pdf online :)

From “For English Majors.” I love this.

If you’re majoring in English, you’re learning a lot about how to read.  Not just words on the page (you knocked that down in elementary school, no?).  You’re learning how to read for sense and meaning.  You’re learning how not to be thrown by long sentences or unfamiliar vocabulary.  You’re learning to follow an idea from the top of the chapter to its end.  You’re reading for style and to know what it adds to sense.  You’re reading between the lines because you know there’s something to be found there.

We’re living in complicated times, and I can’t help but think they’re going to get more complicated and more difficult before some light shines in the distance.  Getting some idea what it all means depends, in part, on learning from people who have some idea (not “pundits,” by the way).  The ability to read, really read, undaunted by complexity, turn of phrase or length of thought, puts you in a position of making some sense of convoluted, technical and controversial ideas and events.

Add to your list of advantages:  Clarity and reasoning (about complicated subjects), logic, expression and patience (with long passages).  You don’t suppose we’d have any reason in work and in life to call on those abilities right about now, do you?

NOTES ON John D. Groppe’s “The Writing Classroom as a Spiritual Site of Composing.” Paper presented at 46th CCCC (Washington, DC, March 23-25, 1995).

John Groppe, in his “The Writing Classroom as a Spiritual Site of Composing,” prefaces his remarks by saying that he came to this topic after attending the “Spiritual Site of Composing” session at the 1992 CCCC. One panel had discussed ways to help students write about “their religious experience and convictions” in an academic context, and Groppe had noticed that the audience members afterward had “tended to focus [their questions] on the students who were judged to be fundamentalists, members of the religious right” (2). Groppe adds / explains, “In the urban setting where the panelists worked, the so-called “fundamentalists” included Islamic students as well as students from a variety of Christian backgrounds. One member of the audience was there, he admitted, to learn about such students so that he might be able to help them break out of their fundamentalist restrictions” (2).  [Use in Cat 1 chapter?]

Groppe then transfers his discussion to the more broader category of religious student in general, those for whom “the academic atmosphere is, at best, not neutral but empty of teachers and classes that would encourage them to deepen their religious resources” (2).  Or academia is for them hostile. Groppe references Mark Schwen who “sees that the current academic climate is hostile to religion” and who traces that hostility back to the Englightenment (and its objectivism or foundationalism (Groppe says Schwen uses both terms)) and its desire to avoid violence.

LDM — this is interesting because 1) I just watched NT Wright (in a video of him at a Los Ranchos Presbytery retreat) in which he makes a very similar point: that religion was kicked out of academica, at least for one reason, in order to avoid war and conflict. (When was the 100 years’ war and all that?)… And because 2) this whole “religion causes conflict” idea comes up so often in my students’ synthesis papers (though that’s probably also because that is also what Rushdie and the Dalai Lama also talk about), and it comes up in, for example, Bill Maher’s Religulous. Steve (Marjorie’s Steve) was telling me Friday night (when I was there playing poker) that Maher actually asserts in that movie that without religion we wouldn’t have wars. (!)

Groppe goes on to summarize Schwen’s argument: “According to the objectivist tradition, religion is at best a group-think, an anti-intellectualism; at worst, it is a crusade seeking to become a moral majority by suppressing all opposition. Nonetheless, in the name of objectivity and the avoidance of suppression, some voices are suppressed” (3).

Groppe also brings in Martin Marty who asks academics to “recognize the genuine humanity of people in religious movements” (4).

In order to help religious students “put their experiences into a larger context without negating their experience,” we need to recognize 1) the “dynamics of religious experience” and 2) “the variety of verbal genres that embody those experienes” (4). And recognize 3) the correspondences between traditional religious modes of appropriation and expression of experience and secucular or non-religious experience” (4).

So Groppe wants to apply his thinking to both religious and non-religious students, because he believes “the same social-psychological dynamics are at work” and the “same variety of verbal forms is put to similar uses” (4) by both groups. But there’s an ADVANTAGE to studying these dynamics and forms in religious groups = “number, variety, and stability of such groups, the abundance of written sources for study, and the abundant opportunity to observe such groups in meetings of worship services and to see first hand the role of verbal forms in their communal life” (4-5).  LDM – So mainly study religious groups / students because it’s easy to?

Grope then provides an example of the variety of religious verbal forms in Benjamin Chavis’ experience becoming exposed to various religious verbal genres while he was serving time in jail. Chavis recorded his theological and ethical reflections in “several literary forms: prayers, laments, meditations, exaltations, critical interrogations, poetry, prophetic prose, doxology, and liturgy” (qtd in Groppe 5).

But then Groppe moves quickly to saying that the PROPHETIC UTTERANCE is probably the “most familiar” (5). – Shrill to many outsiders, but they forget it was the genre of the civil rights movement, as well as movements against Viet Nam and nuclear weapons (yes).  Groppe adds a nice point: “It is often the genre through which people learn of the destruction of the rain forest or the ozone hole or the dangers of population growth, sexual harassment and gender equality, or AIDS” (6).  Prophecy “has both a negative and postive side” (6).

Trick is to help students “get at [the prophetic form’s] origins and possiblities” (6).  It’s connected also to “personal testimonies or autobiographies, lyrical meditation, and songs…” … “epistles of encouragement, instruction, or admonition…” (MLK).

LDM – makes me think that really “prophetic utterance” in Groppe’s definition is like polemic, but more acceptable because 1) it’s less strident, and 2) can often be productive / encouraging.  Prophecy as light polemic? Prophecy as constructive polemic?

PROBLEM, Groppe points out, is the academics tend to privilege 1) academic discourse, or 2) creative writing (6-7).  Groppe then gives a further example of the advantage of working off campus (gains more diversity of genres, etc).  RESULT OF THIS PROBLEM: 1) Limited discourse genres. 2) We teach students to “treat pieces of discourse discretely, atomistically” (7).

By way of example, Groppe says something that really struck me: “For instance, we ask students to writer persuasive discourse and then criticize what they have produced because they have only preached to the converted and have not persuaded anybody; we critique the students because they have not found an audience” (8).  LDM Ouch. Wow, true.

Aristotle etc: Effective persuasion is based on premises between rhetor and audience.  “Effective persuasion is based on some degree of solidarity, or identification with the audience. We ask students to write persuasively, but we do not help them find community or bring more fully to mind the communities they belong to. Instead we ask them to persuade the class, with whom, from their perspective, they have only accidental relationship. We put them in a situation which can provide them no premises on which to base their arguments” (8).

Okay, then Groppe moves on to say that the “mother lode of premises” is “expressive discourse” [manifestoes, testimonies, prayers, etc] (8).  He goes with James Kinneavy’s view that “expressive discourse is, in a very important sense, psychologically prior to all the other uses of language” (qtd in Groppe 8).  Groppe then asserts that “referential and persuasive forms depend on expressive forms of discourse” (8). LDM – simply because the expressive aspect is where the connection is? the premises are? between rhetor and audience?

So, Groppe continues, we should…
1)    Not avoid prophetic utterances from our students
2)    encourage students to “recover the symbols, ideas, and experiences that underlie” their prophetic utterances (9). LDM – at least one other scholar is saying something similar to this, but can’t think of who it is. I keep thinking of Dively’s thing about getting religious students to examine their “subjectivities.”
3)    NEXT encourage students to “explore the variety of written resources within the tradition of their communities – the meditations, prayers, songs, testimonies and autobiographies, manifestoes, the full range” (9).  They get a better grasp of their own experience and confidence.  LDM – Cf. Montesano and Roen p 87 in Vander Lei.  Cf my own Mdiv experience.

ADVANTAGES TO this pedagogical strategy:
1) All students need “to find and to express the solidarity that they need to write well” and to “explore new situations” (9).
2) BUT ALSO cognitive and intellectual growth: by exploring their own “spiritual roots” (9). LDM AH HA yes.  Cf my MDiv!  Students will discover: a) “exemplary figures” (who lived their faith differently), b) “rich dialectics” – e.g., between apostolic and contemporary. “They will discover history, contingency, and divergence in a non-alienating way that will help them begin to manage the divergence and contingency” (10). YES NICE. Cf Edler.

Groppe concludes:
Religious students  their own rich and varied tradition  1) they explore and write from strength, and 2)they see “similar social-psychological, mythological, intellectual dynamics in new settings”, and 3) the classrooms “may begin to become communites of choice” (10).  LDM – which brings Groppe back to his intro where he talked about religious students expriencing a hostile environment (like Israelites in Babylon).

I gotta figure out a way to re-boot my blogging.  Sara picked the right verb for it: my blog is languishing, while I facebook every day.

Marjorie wants more commonplace-booking (love these verbalized nouns), so I’ll start with a quote. Maybe the verb should be “commonplacing.”

By affirming the “extraordinary” call of lay men and women to speak for God, John Wesley expanded the set of available rhetors. By teaching that the preacher must love the listeners as well as persuade them, he transformed pathos from an audience appeal to a requirement for speaking, potentially expanding both ethos and the speaker-audience relationship.

– from Vicki Tolar Burton’s conclusion to her Spiritual Literacy in John Wesley’s Methodism: Reading, Writing, and Speaking to Believe (p. 299).

Get Balancing acts : essays on the teaching of writing in honor of William F. Irmscher / edited by Virginia A. Chappell, Mary Louise Buley- Meissner, Chris Anderson from library. See if Anderson’s essay “Descripton of an Embarrassment” is significantly “expanded” (from the ADE version).

PE1404 .B25 1991  AVAILABLE

Discusses Stephen Carter’s complaint in The Culture of Disbelief (that religious devotion / expression is too often trivialized) to lead up to saying “My point is that our own discourse at times trivializes and misrepresents faith-related expression” (350).

Under subheading “Christian Identity and our theoretical assumptions,” (351) Rand discusses a few “questions being raised by religious scholars” (351) – their concerns about postmodern academy…
1)    James Calvin Shaap described the antogonism he experience toward religious faith when he was in grad school and argues that, in Rand’s words, “religion should be considered a difference along with identity markers such as race and sexual orientation” (351).
A)    Then Rand quotes George Marsden saying that attempts at diversity actually lead to “a dreary uniformity” (33, qtd 351).
2)    “Christian scholarship” discusses also concern that perspectivism [relativism] “has come to occupy a privileged and potentially dangerous place in contemporary culture” (351).
a.    Roger Lundin and others “fear that “construction” has replaced “discovery” as the key metaphor to describe the way we make meaning, that truth is no longer considered to be “found” but only “made” by our manipulation of language (and its manipulation of us). 352 […] Rand continues, “Postmodern self leaves no room for a religious conception of truth or ethics” (352). To this Rand simply points out that she agrees that Pmists have sometimes been dismissive but that Xtns have been overly defensive, adding that Lundin doesn’t take into account feminist studies or critical pedagogy – these movements show that we ARE defined by narratives (which Lundin had said we’re not), etc.
3)    Daniel Reynaud asserts an alternative to the either/or of religious belief and contemporary philosophy. 352.  Reynaud argues that “the problem with postmodern theories is that they become all-encompassing: “ 352.  Rand them quotes Reynaud as saying something I’ve often thought: that yes, of course, in the phenomenological world (“this world”), postmodern is right to say that human perception is limited, etc. But that PM misses the possiblity of something absolute beyond our experience. 353.
a.    Reynaud also points out that language isn’t as fluid and variable as PM want to say.
b.    Rand then lists a few questions writing instructors could ask their students, e.g., “How does the struggle to overcome sin affect your life and the decisions you make about yourself and others?” and I wrote in the margin, “Duh. this is an old theological question. It’s as if compositionists are simply asking their Xtn students to think more within their Christian tradition, to become better Christian intellectuals (to be more like ME basically!).

Christian identity and our profession (353)
1)    COMP STUDIES APPLIES EVOLUTIONARY THINKING TO ITS TREATMENT OF THEORIES. New is Good. Rand then discusses Roskelly and Ronald’s Reason to Believe: Romanticism, Pragmatism, and the Possiblity of Teaching (1998) in which “one of the main points of their argument is that because we have embraced evolutionary models of development and change in our theories of learning since the time of Darwin, we continue to take a linear, survival-of-the-fittest approach to the making of knowledge. This approach “relies on replaclement as necessary and desirabley, and on novelty as necessarily more complex, more ‘fit’ – and therefore better” (101)”. (353)  R and R “maintain that the privileging of what is different and somehow “new” always puts theories in competition rather than in conversation with one another” (353).
a)    All this is apparently to support Rand’s contention that composition studies has too often seen evangelical and other religious discourse from students as “outdated” and/or “naïve.” (354).

a)    EXAMPLES of this EVOLUTIONARY THINKING. Rand then describes the many ways in which compositionists have use evangelical language to villify theories it doesn’t like:
1)    HASHIMOTO  AGAINST EXPRESSIVISTS. His “Voice as Juice.” “probably the most vilified group in compo studies, the “expressivists,”…” 354. She discusses Hashimoto’s sarcastic article against expressivism – “Voice as Juice: Some Reservations about Evangelic Compositions” which “goes so far as to say that expressivist teachers are shameless soul-winners” (354).  LDM – Rand quotes Hashimoto as saying that these “voice evangelists” are against the “evils of complexity,” etc. I don’t get that, don’t get how those who emphasize voice and expression are against complexity. Seems they very much are.  Rand questions “whether [Hashimoto] has exmined his own attempts to convert us in his insistence that personal writing generates such a lack of intellectual depth” (354-55).
2)    JOHN CLIFFORD AGAINST CURRENT-TRADITIONALISTS. Clifford, like Hashimoto uses opposite-evangelical language to denigrade current-traditionalists.  He compares current trad teachers to God – “dispensing knowledge and wisdom from a position of absolute authority” (355).  Rand: “A Christian metaphor has been turned against itself, effectively trivalizing the language of born-again conviction and faith itself” (355).
3)    ELLEN CUSHMAN AGAINST the ASSUMPTIONS Of CRITICAL PEDAGOGY. Cushman is concerned about “the movement’s religious talk” and doesn’t want to be “anyone’s savior.” 356.  Rand points to the “Robin Hood” metaphor Cushman uses of activism.  Rand: “…perhaps if we tried to collapse the binary between “rebelliousness” and “religiosity” (even evangelical religiosity), we would find new ways of talking about faith” 356.
4)    LAD TOBIN IDENTIFIES as RELIGIOUS.  Teacher as preacher (or rabbi, in his case). But Tobin also trivializes / disdains evangelicalism: he is “as disdainful of evangelicalism as the next academician” (he says).   Rand: “the assumption that an academician would automatically be disdainful of evangelical faith puzzles me” (357).
a.    TO SUM UP… Rand continues, “I need to be clear that it is not our disapproval of oppressive Christian religious practices that I question: it is the way we call upon metaphors so precious to many devout people. We trivialize faith when we imply that to believe in sin or salvation just isn’t credible or that evangelicalism is so easily dismissed. Our options are then narrowed for thinking about this kind of religious expression in the classroom.”

Christian identity and our classrooms. 357
Compositions have various negative responses to students who write about their Xtn experience: “embarrassment, anger, and a refusal to even consider an essay based on what is termed “dogmatic,” dualistic thought” (357)
1)    JANICE NEULEIB’s description of the AP essay readers, who were “appalled” by such “pious-sounding language” (357)
2)    CHRIS ANDERSON.  CA worries about the unexamined assumptions of his TA (which makes her position somewhat hypocritical); she needs to give religious rhetoric “its due” (13) because describing faith is very difficult.
a.    Rand’s critique: “…although defending the use of religious rhetoric, [CA] makes clear that it must be of a certain type in order to succeed in the secular classroom. According to him, the “testimonial,” “Guideposts magazine type” offered byt eh TA’s student Cathy will certainly fail: “It’s not just the simplicity and superficiality [of such writing] that bother me. I’m bothered more by Cathy’s assumption of authority, however mild, even sweet, which is what I think bothers all of us – not foolishness but foolishness that is unware of itself” (12). Anderson would seem to contradict himself when later he declares that “no kind of lnaguage should be seen as necessarily superior to any other” (13). Granted, he concedes that Cathy’s rhetoric is appropriate in other situations – “a church meeting, in prayer discussions, and so on” (13) – yet that admission seems to count for little. Her “sweet,” “foolish” discourse is good enough only for worship and prayer (and, one would suppose, for Guideposts readers). I understand that as composition instructors we want our students to become more critical and self-aware. But calling their religious expression “superficial” and “sweet” bothers me. Anderson is troubled by the TA’s inability to problematize her own position, yet he appears to repeat the same mistake. He claims to be open to the possiblity of faith-centered discourse but never stops to consider the rather condescending ways he constructs those who identify as Christian” (357-358).
3)    DESCRIPTION of BELIEVERS as “WITNESSES” 358ff
a.    Acts 1:8
b.    Php 2:3-7,9, 2:10-11
c.    Rand is intrigued by the term “witnesses” 359. “Witnessing talk” is the kind of faith-centered discourse about which writing instructors complain most frequently and is the location from which we borrow in our criticism of other theoretical positions within compo studies” 359.
d.    PARALLELS BETWEEN THIS WITNESSING TALK AND OUR OWN FIELD.
1)    SUBJECTIVITY. SELF. CS Lewis, The Problem of Pain. Xtns need to “die daily.” “This need to die daily is, in a manner of speaking, what we as comp scholars encourage in our own students. Social epistemic rhetoricians in particular posit that none of us are “unified subjects” or “autonomous beings” (Berlin, Bizzell, Faigley). They refute the idea of a rational, coherent self fully in control of its own destiny, though, as many theorists have pointed out, the ideology of capitalism promotes such a view of subjectivity: [quote]. (359) Cf Dively.  “Compositionists call for students to “lose” the notion of a unified self (ultimately oppressed because it is distracted from cultivating greater critical awareness) in order to “find” the multiple and partial self (ideally liberated because it is conscious of the reality of social construction): we act as witnesses hoping to convert others to the faith. Our testimonials suggest that we desperately want our students to “get saved” – to get outside themselves so that a life-changing transformation can occur.” 360
2)    PAULO FREIRE. AUGUSTINE. testimonials and bearing witness… to “ongoing struggles for social justice” 360. “For comp studies, evil results from a lack of critical consciousness. It is a remarkably similar conceptualization to that offered by fourth-century rhetorician St Augustine:” [quote from Augustine talking about  how evil takes away our agency.] Original sin = lack of true agency. “Compositionists who testify to the injustice of racism, sexism, and classism draw our attention to outward evils [cf to Aug’s emphasis on inward evils] created by human beings’ inward lack or poverty of imagination and spirit. This lack is strengthened when others are convinced of its logic or inevitability. We typically argue that agency cannot be assert until the self becomes  reflexive enough to gain a “sense of itself” as socially produced in and through language. Only then, it would follow, can one be set free or “born again” in some sense: empowered to resist cultural codes that create suffering and alienation” (361).

Christian identity and the rhetoric of resistance. 361 ff
Stephen Carter also points out that, as Rand says, “the refusal to surrender one’s moral beliefs to the authority of others is finally “a trait that liberal politics should value, not oppose, for it yields precisely the diversity that America needs” (174).
“Religion, rightfully understood, is a subversive force; thus, if writing instructors want to motivate evangelical students to reflect upon faith-centered identity, perhaps we should start from the premise that religious convictions (even those within conservative forms of Xty) are considered by many to be “radical,” and we should frame our questions in more evocative ways”“ (361)
Rand then quotes RUBIN as pointing out that “linguistic resistance does into arise from ignorance of standard forms; to the contrary, maintaining nonstandard forms often entails considerable language awareness” (Rubin 8).

When writing instructors try to makes Xtn students testimonials into something “more sophisticated,” they “failed to recognize that appealing to the transgressive nature of this kind of subjectivity might produce better results.
1)    Chris Anderson “suggests that it is possible to offer a model of a “better, because [it is] more sophisticated, understanding of religious experience” (15), which strikes me as not only somewhat presumptuous but also lacking respect for the deeply intimate and profoundly personal ways that human beings come to make meaning of what is sacred” 362
2)    Ronda Leathers Dively “also concludes that the dualistic quality of much of their discourse must be reshaped into a respectable academic form” 362  Rand wonders specifically about Dively’s assumptions when Dively says “Many [Christians] who have been fed [a] narrow view of subjectivity may perceive themselves as rigidly defined by belief in the tenets of holy scripture and of faith in the existence and saving power of Jesus Christ. …” [LDM I’m not even understanding what Dively is saying here.]  RAND: “I’m troubled by the lingering assumption that we’d naturally think it constrictive for God to be at the center of someone’s universe.” 362
a.    Dively and Anderson assume this submission of one’s will to X leads to a lack of critical thought. 362.  Rand: but this “kind of obedient rhetorical stance is also considered to be transgressive of the established order and therefore reflects people’s ability to think and act for themselves. Evil triumps when the self is compelled to follow worldly teachings that reflect the enslaved ego rather than the bold and daring ways of God” 363 [nice]. [Cf Romans 12]
b.    “Witnessing talk DOES involved a complex interrogation of the self: it can in fact be thought-provoking” 363
PEDAGOGICAL ADVICE
We should ask students…
“to explain how their resistance to mainstream values and culture has shaped their lives and how those outside their immediate faith communites respond to them” 363
Suggestions for writing assignments…
writing about their religious subculture [cf Dodie’s assignment like that]
ethnographic project, interviews…

CONCLUSION
“I do believe we can challenge students to think further about their religious identities.” 364 … to call upon a quote from [Thomas] Newkirk’s book [The Performance of Self in Student Writing], “the spirit of [the invitation that we offer to students remains] critical. It is one thing to demonstrate an alternative – to extend a repertoire; it is another to try to eradicate a ‘lower’ form of consciousness” (102)” 364.

“Comp studies itself preaches  a kind of born-again faith: we want students to get saved and to resist subject positions that discourage critical awarness. For that reason alone we should not view testimonial rhetoric as anti-intellectual or cliché. Perhaps we should invite students to explain why this kind of discourse has had such significance in their lives. We should promite further conversation about evangelical identity and its central importance to many people’s worldview.” 362

Finally, I’m posting something. Messy notes. But notes, nonetheless.  And I’m typing while standing up — ’cause my hip bursitis is irritated big time — and probably from too much sitting over the last two or three weeks, writing papers and preparing my course.  So I stand. Here I stand.  I can sit no other. ;)

In “Spilt Religion: Student Motivation and Values-Based Writing,” published in Writing on the Edge in 1992, Janice Neuleib suggests that writing instructors would do well to learn how to respond to religious values-based writing from their students in such a way 1) that encourages the student’s self-knowledge / awareness of the sources and implications of her values, 2) that encourages students to tap into the “flow” and “peak experience” that writing about deeply-held values can provide (and which gives power to writing and thought), and 3) that helps students discover the values that “evoke [their] passions and those of [their] readers” (49). Neuleib discusses Csikszentmihalyi (on flow and optimal experience), James Porter (on need for revival of classical notion of ethos), and James Zebroski (on the power of personal values / experience to be used to doubt and question “those above us in the system”) in order to differentiate between more purely philosophical or rational writing/thinking and values-based writing/thinking. They both produce “flow,” but the latter produces “a different level of intellectual excitement” (45).

Basically, Neuleib is saying that we ought to encourage value-based (religious / spiritual) writing in our students and we ought to learn how to respond well to it, because: 1) that kind of writing is where the power is — the power to understand one’s OWN thinking / feeling and the power to tap into one’s audience’s own thinking / feeling, AND to have the strongest impact on the world.

In other words, if we just stick to the “disappassionate and logical” we are “dispossessed of the necessary connections with the compelling experiences that focus and motivate our writing” (46). Cf Crowley.

_____

AP exam essay readers wanted to give essays using religious language “very low score[s]… for lack of reasoning ability” (42). But for Neuleib, religious knowledge (using words such as “Bible” and “sin) = self-knowledge. “When I asked the readers to try submitting language like “through greater self-awareness we can learn about our own responsibilities for the evils that befall us and others and can become depressed by that responsibility, feeling grief and sorry.If, however we take that self-awareness one step further and forgive ourselves our past errors and indiscretions, we can learn to live happier and more fulfilling lives, making use of our sorrows,” they were startled at their decreased irritation” (43).

LDM — if I understand Neuleib correctly, she’s taking a student’s religious conversion narrative — e.g., “I was lost and now I’m found for God saved me” (or somethign like that) — and translating it to say, “I was lost and now I’m found because I figured out how to save myself.” It’s hard to say whether I’ve got her meaning exactly right, though, because Neuleib doesn’t give an example of what she’s translation; she just gives the “translation” (as in the one above).

But this translation method does seem like Neuleib’s effort to enable writing instructors to see beyond what they might disagree with (different values? or different religion? or different language?), in order to see the ideas and reasoning and writing ability of their students.

She continues, “… so we must find approaches that enable us to negotiate the differing terms in which we phrase our values. Though my redefinition of terms might have offended the young writers who wrote passionately of their religious convictions [yes, it probably would], their readers were able to accept the phrases I substituted whereas thsoe readers before refused to consider the socially and politically charged expressions of what to them seemed naive and immature thought” (43).

LDM — well, isn’t one better solution then to enlighten teachers so that they can see mature thought in thought that is not like their own? or to see mature thought in language that is not like their own?

cf. Crowley. …”To be dispassionate and logical is to be dispossessed of the necessary connections with the compelling experiences that focus and motivate our writing” (46).

Neuleib draws on Jim Porter’s call for revival of ETHOS ["Values are rooted in experiences and our interpretations of those experiences. The writer / rhetor can only discover and interpret those values by writing through the issues that deeply move and motivate and, i would add, by doing so invigorate the writing experience itself"] and James Zebroski’s “six ways in which he continues to interrogate his own teaching… [doubt, resistance, skepticism, "study up" anthropology, literacy and power as public issues, and narrative]. Neuleib describes her experience being a “table leader” at an English examination, the way her graders wanted to grade down students who used religious language [to a question that ask a basically religious question! in this case], and the way in which her advice to them to translate the students religious language / phrases with “self-awareness” and “personal knowledge” enabled the readers “to see the writer as a person with an idea that might qualify for a middle score” (43).

RELIGION, EMOTION, and FLOW. Neuleib draws on Csikszentmihalyi’s to remind us of the importance of emotion in good writing, in “flow” (44).  “He found that writers in English classes unfortunately do not often epxerience such conditions [wherein self-consciousness disappears, concentration intsense, excellent flow...]. I would speculate that the rules against emotionally-packed expression in school might inhibit students’ discovery that writing can produce optimal experience” (44).  Neuleib then goes on to distinguish between the flow produced by philosophical and value questions, the latter providing a “different level of intellectual excitment” (45).

“VALUES VERSUS VISIONS”.  “I think that the readers at my table responded negatively to student AP writers who talked about Jesus because both the readers and writers had confused rules with values and routine with ritual, perhaps because we are unsure of our values and have so few really effective rituals in our culture.  To return once again to Csikszentmihalyi, optimal religious experience tends to be lacking in our culture, except perhaps at rock concerts, symphonies, or among the few mystics experiencing the mythic power of ritual. Since we have little experience of the ritualistic ecstacy, Csil.. describes in other cultures, we tend to see religion either as keeping the social order or as comforting (or boring, depending on one’s perspective) repetition” (46).  [...] “I want to meet students where they stand on values but move them toward a perspective that can enrich both their writing and their ability to articulate the sources of their values” (46).

Get at Library: Richard Beach’s High School Students’ Competing Social Worlds [on teaching multicultural lit] LC1099.3 .B42 2008

Giroux, Theory and Resistance. LB885.G472 T48 1983

Hardin’s Opening Spaces: Critical Pedagogy and Resistance Theory… not available

Moffett, “Censorship and Spiritual Education” (1989/1990)

Moffett argues that true spiritual education (that which enables one to rest in the oneness behind the plurality of things) is the best model to use for literacy education, education which, more specifically, encourages exposure to the universe of discourses, texts, and voices — with little or no controlling that exposure by teachers.

M beings by defining spirituality in contrast to religion and morality. The latter have to do with group meaning; the former with “perception of oneness behind the plurality of things” (113).

M then describes a textbook controversy that took place in 1974 in West Virginia. Protestors feared losing their children to outside influences. “They believe that most topics English teachers think make good discussion are about matters they consider already settled” (114).

M points out that the “real enemy” is the “outsider,” because outsiders attack authority in general. Then M simply says that it’s easy to make a connection between attacking authority and attacking the nuclear family.  He then provides examples of two pieces of literature that censors claimed showed parents as failures: Gina Berriault’s short story “The Stone Boy,” and Oscar Lewis’ The Children of Sanchez. 114

Censors feared also that Christ himself was being attacked. M says censors were upset with poems that, as M states it, “try to make Christ real to today’s secular readers” (115).  These include T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magic” which is called “mocking and blasphemous.”

Censors feared also attacks on the state. In his own program, M was using or planning on using transcripts of testimony from Vietnam vets. These censors thought to make students feel guilty (!). M then points to the way in which the censors were trying to avoid self-examination, and then points to psychological research on “authoritarian or dogmatic personalities” which points to the way in which these personalities are accompanied by “anti-intraception” or fear of inwardness (115). [LDM – hence also why personal writing, or even process writing, any self-aware writing can be so helpful.]

But M goes on to say that “Know thyself” is the “supreme tenet of spiritual education” (116). [LDM cf Augustine?]

The censors would calls personal or self knowledge “invasion of privacy.”  Which in turn, says M, the censors connect to “morbidity and negativity which, if denied in oneself, becomes targets in books” (116).  [LDM VERY INTERESTING POINT, and one no one else I’ve read has made]

M then lists five pieces of literature that one censor listed and gave reasons for rejecting: They include Alfred Noyes, Kipling, Poe, Jack London. For example, “”Danny Deaver,” Rudyard Kipling – Poem concerning a military hanging” (116) or “To Build a Fire,” Jack London – A man freezes to death” (116).

M then points out that the “case the censors make differs not a great deal from Plato’s reason for banishing the poets. Dwelling on Barth’s “bad news” just keeps you down. Why not keep fixed on the good news, gospel, the word of God?” (116). IN other words, we become what we think about (so the sayings go).

But M reminds us that literary artists try to WORK as good news “even though it may be wrought from the bad news of self-examination and other worldly realities, because they feel the transformative effect of the imagination.  In its secular way literature tries to act as gospel. But if read shallowly, both holy writ and literature can be dangerous, because their rhetorical power and spellbinding stories can attach readers even more to surface forms than they already are” (116). GOOD REMINDER.

M then spends a couple paragraphs developing his claim that “schools will become spiritual to the extent that they reduce manipulation” (117).  Otherwise we “infantalize” students. [cf Salman Rushdie’s use of that word in “Imagine There’s No Heaven…”]

—– > put students “in a stance of responsible decision making and in an unplanned interaction with other people” (117)
1)    drop textbooks. Use trade books. [LDM find where I saw someone else saying that – check eng 588 notes]
2)    “go strongly for” individual and small group reading
3)    no syllabi. Instead a classroom library
– >because “Any specific presenting and sequencing of texts… shorts circuits the learning process and undermines the will of the student” (117). (emphasis in original) [LDM Counter to some of what we discussed in 588 – re the need to sequence texts in ways that promote intertextuality, etc]

“Pluralism is central to this process because spirituality depends on widening the identity” (117).  And knowing = identifying

We need to expose students to:
    all kinds of discourse
    all heritages
    all kinds of voices

[LDM but M doesn’t talk about making these assumptions explicit in the classroom Cf Bizzell.]

M then contrasts his now-developed concept of spiritual education with its opposite: AGNOSIS (118).  Agnosis is the “not wanting to know” that happens when our sense of selves as individuals and groups fear learning anything “that will disturb such identifications” (118). “Agnosis is self-censorship.” 118

[whole paragraph] “Creek preachers aren’t the only ones afraid of reading and writing. We all are, and that is the real reason that reading and writing have proved inordinately difficult to teach. Literacy is dangerous and has always been so regarded. It naturally breaks down barriers of time, space, and culture. It threatens one’s original identity by broadening it through vicarious experiencing and the incorporation of somebody else’s hearth and ethos. So we feel profoundly ambiguous about literacy. Looking on it as a means of transmitting our culture to our children, we give it priority in education, but, recognizing the threat of its backfiring, we make it so tiresome and personally unrewarding that youngsters won’t want to do it on their own, which is when it becomes dangerous. This is an absurd state of affairs, but it is a societal problem going beyond schools alone to the universal fear of literacy – a fear based on ethnocentricity – and to the educational goal of transmitting the culture” (188).

M then asserts that really we worry too much about transmitting culture – because culture is “caught, not taught” (118).  So, basically, “if we pulled out all the stops on literacy, quit fearing it, and gave it to youngsters wholeheartedly for personal inquiry, we would produce a nation of real readers who would be far more familiar with great books than they are today. Overcontrolling the content of reading, writing, and discussing has the same effect as censorship. Let’s not castigate those bigots over there if we’re doing our own version of the same thing” (188).

“The world is warring right and left because the various cultures strive so intently to perpetuate themselves that they end by imposing themselves on each other. These lethal efforts to make others like oneself burlesque the expanded identity that would make possible real global unity. The secret of war is that nations need enemies to maintain definition, because differences define” (118-119).

M ends by kind of philosophizing or theologizing that the reason cultures HAVE religions or anything (like “great books”) that tries to transcend its own (cultural) exclusivity is because that exclusivity is so dangerous [and M must think cultures are at least somewhat self-conscious of that danger].  “Actually, I think the deepest spiritual teachings in all cultures have tried to achieve this goal but, in doing so, seem subversive, which is why they had to go underground, where historians rarely find them. If schools [as opposed to religions? or spiritual traditions?] took on the transcending of cultural conditioning, it would hardly mean more than fulfilling the already professed goal of teaching the young to think for themselves” (119).

But, he points out, “truly free inquiry” always conflicts with the goal of “cultural transmission and identity maintenance” and so “we have sabotaged our own noble aim” (119).   He ends by saying “If we educate youngsters to transcend their heritage, they will be able to transform it…” (199).

Sorry I haven’t been posting. I went from 28 posts in January to only 1 in February, so, yep, got a little busy there. But I’m still here, and my words’ll pop up on this blog occasionally. I hope! Now, back to work…

Oh wait — here are a couple cool quotes I’ve found lately:

If we look at the history of writing instruction in America, we find that writing teachers have been as much or more interested in who they want students to be as in what they want their students to write (396). —Lester Faigley

[T]he most valuable political act any teacher can perform is not to impose particular political views but to teach students to see the words that society tries to inject into them unseen. —Wayne Booth, The Vocation of a Teacher 154

Shafer recounts his experience with Danielle a student he worked with over two semesters (lucky him), a student who in her reading and writing was overdependent on authority figures (particularly her pastor) for her interpretations.  She would say things like, “I checked with my minister and he pointed to these passages in the Bible” (qtd 320).  (She was “bright and congenial,” (326), not at all an overtly resistant student)

“Whether the discussion revolved around a woman’s place in the home or the policy toward gay and lesbian marriage, Danielle appeared to rely on the perspective of her religious teachings and specifically the Bible in all her opinions” (321) [and I would add – her INTERPRETATION of the Bible…]

Shafer does a good job of showing the aspects of Rosenblatt’s description reader-response theory which apply to this situation.  “For Rosenblatt… a text becomes a poem when it is imbued with life by the experiences and values of the reader” (320).

Rosenblatt: “In the modling of any specific literary experience, what the student brings to literature is as important as the literary text itself” (Rosenblatt 82 qtd in Shafer 321)

[It is imperative that the instructor] “create a setting that makes it possible for the student to have a spontaneous response to literature […]. Once the student has responded freely, a process of growth can be initiated” (Rosenblatt 108 qtd in Shafer 321).  Shafer continues, “Reading, then, must be a dynamic moment in time, not a mechanical recollection of embedded, monolithic truths. Reading must be fluid and new with each transation” (321).

spontaneous, free, dynamic, fluid, new… (helpful cluster of adjectives)

I.e., no authority figures appropriating a reader’s responses (ldm)

“In addition to preventing an understanding of what is read, rigid attitudes may seriously impair the reader’s judgment even of what he has understood” (Rosenblatt 101 qtd in Shafer 321).

Cf. my ethnography

Shafer then moves to “Reader-Response Writing,” focusing the rest of his article on the ways in which he tried to create a space for Danielle in which she could own, investigate and express her view for different audiences. Cf Dively (for emphasis on self-discourse-investigation) and Carter (for emphasis on audience). Danielle “had to write for the atheist and the communist as well as those who shared her views” (322).

Shafer then brings in Probst here, Probst pointing out that “the writer must have integrity, which means not unthinkingly accepting the judgments of others (71 qtd in 323), and that students should draw upon “an awareness of the reader…” But I would think a compositionist wouldn’t even have to quote another scholar to make this point about audience – just seems like a given in the field. Shafer does quote Probst that “this is the case ‘even if the reader is never anyone but the writer’ her- or himself,” but that seems a given, too.

In the beginning of the semester(s), Danielle would say things like, “It’s hard to understand if one is not a Christian. I can’t explain it, but I believe it” (qtd 323). Telling quote, brings out the unexamined-ness.

Here Shafer brings in Vygotsky emphasizing the need for “play, experimentation, introspection, and the learning that they afford” (323). Cool.  Playing (risk free playing) = crucial to learning.

I think Danielle represts a fairly extreme case of over-dependence on authorities. Or, she represents an extreme case of when a teacher KNOWS the student is over-depending on authorities. I can imagine a male “fundamentalist” student, instead of saying, “I’ll have to check with my pastor,” saying, “This is just what I means. I just know!” (hiding the authority behind the opinion).

Then Shafer brings in Frank Smith’s “reminder that we all learn to read and write by identifying ourselves with a “club” or group of people who think and speak like us – people who accept and celebrate our common beliefs” (324) Yes, discourse community.  This is interesting, though: “According to Smith, people ‘learn the language of the groups to which they belong (or expect to belong) and resist the language of the gorups they reject or from which they are rejected’” (Smith 21 qtd 324).  I don’t think I’d heard or thought much about the part about rejecting (how consciously?) other discourses. That could be a helpful point.  - related to Brandt’s literacy sponsors.

So Shafer reminded his students – who had become fairly intolerant of Danielle’s religious devotion – that “we all are part of a language tradition and that Danielle’s approach is no different from those of others who might refer to the Founding Fathers, Karl Marx, or MLK Jr as a paradigm for reading and universal truths. Indeed, the very fact that so many referred to our Founding Fathers might suggest that we have elevated these very falllible men – men who held slaves and denied women the right to vote – to the position of secular gods. Throughout the semester, I was forever reminding my writers that authority figures are part of our language and culture, and it is part of the academic setting to question them but to do so with respect” (324) Yes, excellent point and well put!

Shafer then goes on to discuss how he facilitate Danielle’s learning / empowerment. Key = earning her trust. Shafer and Danielle talked about the way in which media and Amer culture “depict religions as dogmatic and provincial” (325). Shafer agreed with her that pop culture “is often unfair to the sincere and diverse beliefs of religious organizations” (325).

SPECIFIC pedagogical (advice): Shafer let Danielle focus on “luminaries from her church” as sources in her FINAL draft, let her ignore sources from “mainstream academic sources” because, as he explained, “she insisted that I did not respect the luminaries from her church that she was using” (325). He wanted her to feel empowered (in addition to learn to be sensitive to audience and use other sources).

“This demonstrated my willingness to acknowledge her ownership over her writing and reminded her that I wasn’t trying to change her” (325).  “At the same time, of course, I was committed to her right to believe in absolute truths, in tenets that are insulated from social change and transcend the ideological. The goal was not to undermine to trivialize these beliefs but to animate them in a broader, more critical, more probing fashion. This distinction, I believe, is important. Each student’s passionate beliefs must be respected, and it is not the writing teacher’s job to undermine time-honored values. If I were to trivialize D’s religious experience – or her fealty to her minister – I would simply replace one authority figure with another [yes!!]” (325-26).

Challenge = “enliven D’s language experience” while respecting her “claimed identity” (326). IDENTITY – Cf. Rand 2001, Swearingen 1997, Williams 2005, Moffett 1990.

Shafer brings in historian Howard Zinn’s notion of thinking beyond the obvious (326). Students (of course) must examine traditions – traditions must “stand the test of of the scholarly classroom” (327).

Shafer invited Danielle “to persuade [the class] by scrutinizing the nuances of her creed” (327). “Each of her sources, including her church members and her minister, had to fit the profile of an expert and her notions of scholarship were scrutinized in student forums” (327).   He encourage D to celebrate and interrogate her ideals for herself and the class.  “Now she had to emerge from the sahdows that Rosenblatt discussed and put the spotlight on her transaction with the various texts she encountered” (327).  Reader – center stage.

Danielle wrote an essay on marriage and role of women. She wrote/said, “Despite what many of you might believe, the traditional values of the stay-at-home mom were good for the country and good for the family. Traditional marriage is good for society and good for individuals” (qtd 327). Yes, this way she makes a cause-and-effect claim (as we require in WR 121 classes for their research papers). And she even sets up a thesis with tension, a “they say, I say.”  Danielle uses evidence, the divorce rate, confusion in society re how to support a family. 327

Shafer concludes that Danielle was “eventually compelled – through the class’s invitation to defend her ideals – to transcend the tenets of her church and rely on her own transactions with texts as a way to defend her positions” (327-28).   Students had asked her to supply statistics [yes!] and told her “I don’t care what the Bible says.”  [Ooh, makes me think I should try a similar plan when I teach the research paper next term – have students try to persuade fellow students.]  Danielle even successfully included a nay-sayer.

“Being thrust into this kind of academic torrent [of fellow-student responses / disbelief] required D to begin to transcend her strict dependence on her minister…” (329).  And “her need to play the role of instructor in a class-wide forum create a need for her to be engaged in the texts she read and to assume an active role. She was, in short, a more reflective person within a conservative discourse community” (329).
“We must always invite [students with zealous convictions] to play but never suggest that their speech community is not valid” (330).

Nice quote from Rosenblatt: “Above all, the word cannot be understood in isolation; it must be seen in the varity of its possible contexts” (112 in 330).

“Some of us try to speak from the perspective of the academic community with which we feel a connection. Others want to mirror the religious congregation that animates their thoughts. All approaches need to be respected” (330).

Terry Dean argues that “with increasing culturel diversity in classrooms, teachers need to structure learning experiences that both help students write their way into the university and help teachers learn their way into student cultures” (Dean 105 qtd 330).

[Dean in 3rd ed of Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook – rats, I have the first and fourth eds]

Barker, Thomas T., and Fred O. Kemp. “Network Theory: A Postmodern Pedagogy for the Writing Classroom.” Computers and Community. Ed. Carolyn Handa. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1990. 1-27. Have Valley copy of book.

Bomberger, Ann M. “Ranting about race: Crushed eggshells in computer-mediated communication.” Computers and Composition 21 (2004): 197-216. Pdf and hard copy.

Bump, Jerome. “Radical Changes in Class Discussion Using Networked Computers.” Computers and the Humanities 24 (1990): 49-65. (In Lenard’s Works Cited)

Castner, Joanna A. “The Clash of Social Categories: What Egalitarianism in Networked Writing Classrooms?” Computers and Composition 14 (1997): 257-268. Pdf and hard copy.

Cooper, Marilyn M., and Cynthia L. Selfe. “Computer Conferences and Learning: Authority, Resistance, and Internally Persuasive Discourse.” College English 52.8 (1990): 847-869. Hard copy.

Cooper, Marilyn (1999). Postmodern possibilities in electronic conversations. In Gail E. Hawisher & Cynthia L. Selfe (Eds.) Passions, pedagogies, and 21st century technologies (pp. 140-160).  Logan: Utah State University. Summited 2-18-09

Faigley, Lester. Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. Hard copy of chapter.

The postmodern era is characterized by randomness of experience, unopposed by any transcendent terms, a randomness that terrifies with the prospect of total dissolution while exhilarating with the possibility of free play of identities and social locations—that is, of subject positions. Composition pedagogy is often unresponsive to postmodernity, continuing to assume that unitary selves compose purposeful, linearly structured, generically recognizable texts. While this focus is often promoted by academic institutions as serving the practical ends of efficient communication, composition scholars increasingly resist it as oppressive to diverse students. A more postmodern composition study entails looking at how discourses, and the unequal power relations among them, are historically produced. Yet the field is still reluctant to abandon a unitary notion of students’ subjectivities. The field needs the kind of destabilized, decentered view that characterizes the networked classroom, where online discussion allows free play with different personae and even “forbidden” discourses (e.g., homophobic, racist, sexist). The problem that remains is how to establish an ethics of engagement for social action against the oppressive economic and discursive structures that postmodern analysis purports to reveal. Winner of CCCC Outstanding Book Award for 1994.

Hawisher, Gail E., and Cynthia Selfe. “Teaching Writing at A Distance: What’s Gender Got to Do with It?”

Kremers, Marshall. “Sharing Authority on a Synchronous Network: The Case for Riding the Beast.” Computers and Composition 7 (1990): 33-44. NEED

Laurinen, Leena I., and Miika J. Marttunen. “Written arguments and collaborative speech acts in practising the argumentative power of language through chat debates.” Computers and Composition 24 (2007): 230-246. Pdf and hard copy.

LeCourt, Donna. “Critical Pedagogy in the Computer Classroom: Politicizing the Writing Space.” Computers and Composition 15 (1998): 275-295. Pdf and hard copy.

Lenard, Mary. “Dealing with Online Selves: Ethos Issues in Computer-Assisted Teaching and Learning.” Pedagogy 5.1 (2005): 77-95. Have copy of issue (AH’s), need to make copy.

McKee, Heidi. “‘YOUR VIEWS SHOWED TRUE IGNORANCE!!!’: (Mis)Communication in an online interracial discussion forum.” Computers and Composition 19 (2002): 411-434. Pdf and hard copy.

McKee, Heidi. “‘Always a Shadow of hope’: Heteronormative binaries in an online discussion of sexuality and sexual orientation.” Computers and Composition 21 (2004): 315-340. Pdf and hard copy.

McMillan-Clifton, Alexis. “The Confluence: Process Theory, Contact Zones, and Online Composition.” TCC 2007 Proceedings. Pdf and hard copy.

Regan, Alison. “‘Type normal like the rest of us’: Writing, Power, and Homophobia in the Networked Composition Classroom.” Computers and Composition 9.4 (1993): 11-23. http://computersandcomposition.osu.edu/archives/v10/10_4_html/10_4_2_Regan.html   Can’t find online in CC archives (via Valley)  HTML and hard copy

Romano, Susan. “The Egalitarian Narrative: Whose Story? Which Yardstick?”

Spears, Russell, and Martin Lea. “Panacea or Panopticon? The Hidden Power in Computer-Mediated Communication.” Communication Research 21.4 (1994): 427-459. Avail at Valley P91 .C56
ABSTRACT: This article examines how interaction by means of computer-mediated communication (CMC) affects the operation of both status differentials and power relations. The authors attempt to provide a corrective to the dominant assessment, particularly within social psychological analyses, that CMC tends to equalize status, decentralize and democratize decision making, and thus empower and liberate the individual user. This emphasis contrasts with sociological critiques employing the Foucauldian metaphor of the panopticon, claiming that power relations can actually be reinforced in CMC. The authors argue that prevailing conceptualizations of influence and power within social psychology have tended to prefigure the more optimistic account, and outline a theoretical framework in which processes of “panoptic power” in CMC are given a more concrete social psychological foundation.

Sujo de Montes, L.E., et al. “Power, language, and identity: Voices from an online course.” Computers and Composition 19 (2002): 251-271. Pdf and hard copy.

Trimbur, John. “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning.” College English 51 (1989): 602-616. Hard copy.

Warshauer, Susan Claire. “Rethinking Teacher Authority to Counteract Homophobic Prejudice in the Networked Classroom: A Model of Teacher Response and Overview of Classroom Methods.” Computers and Composition 21.1 (1995): 97-111. Pdf and hard copy.

One of the great pleasures of teaching composition is when students recognize their voices and no longer regard the essay as the enemy, but rather as an extension of their minds.

Simple, but I love that statement. It’s from Maria Johnson’s “Using Blogs As Writing Journals”

form and content, form and content, matter and energy, spirit and matter, ideas and sentences, html and well-crafted sentences…

It’s interesting how form and content, via increasing technology, are getting more imbricated, more meshed, more obviously bound up with each other, more inherent with each other. So, the Greek view and the Gnostic view (that spirit is the only thing that matters, that the body would do well to be left behind) is wrong. Wrong, wrong, can’t be right. And our technology helps us see that, right?

Thought seems like, or traditional metaphysical / theistic thinking is that thought can exist separate from a body, in the way an idea can exist separate from the essay it’s expressed in (and separate from the paper the essay is printed on). The soul is immaterial, in other words. Phooey!

What about all the things that help YOU understand ME? space between words, paragraphs, fonts style, font size, language, black on white is easier to read than light on dark, etc? All of this points to the “fact” that 1) I can’t FIND my thought (or CREATE it) without form and substance. 2) You can’t understand my thought without form and substance. Without messy slippery dirty chunks of material (or thin slices), or electrons.

The tools for thought are just getting lighter: rocks inscribed, clay tablets, animal skins (vellum), tree pulp (paper), computer punch cards, now electrons. More and more seemingly ethereal.

Or… it’s interesting that just when we THINK we can separate content from form we find out that we never could, never can. Actually, I don’t know what this reality proves. I just like the way it’s an analogia entis to the biblical view (well, the more traditional Hebraic (non Hellenistic) view) that you can’t have a human without a specific body AND you can’t have a human without a specific soul. Both. Together. Soul-body. Body-soul. Ain’t no separation.

But we like to perceive a separation, probably because we have such powerful imaginations and such powerful technology. The more ethereal (and ephemeral!) our “writing” gets, the more we see that “writing” as having a personhood,  a life of its own. “I am the Edison phonograph,” said the advertisements in 1906.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Long day tomorrow.

NOTES ON Dively, Ronda Leathers. “Censoring Religious Rhetoric in The Composition Classroom: What We and Our Students May Be Missing.” Composition Studies 25.1 (Spring 1997): 55-66.

Describes her experiences with students from an Advanced Composition and a few honors first-year composition classes to show that it is inaccurate, is stereotyping, when writing instructors assume that “religious inquiry will necessarily or even probably elicit simplistic, unsophisticated discourse” (57).

She does a quick survey of scholars who assume this dualism, who at least assume that first-year comp students will exhibit this simplistic thinking when they write about religious topics. 1) Chris Anson “depicts the quinessential “dualistic” writer as a student writing from a religious perspective” (56); 2) David Bleich “connects religious belief with simplistic thinking when he argues that ‘religious views collaborate with the ideology of individualism and with sexism to censor the full capability of what people can say and write’” (168); 3) Gilbert Fell “asserts that the tendency to comprehend the world in oppositions and polarities is widely prevalent in the realm of religious faith where believers construct a reality of ‘saints and sinners, the saved and the damned, the wise and the foolish, the good and the evil, the angels and the demons, the creator and the creatures…’” (57); and “even” Chris Anderson “who ultimately defends students’ rights to religious inquiry, maintains that student-written religious discourse typically fails to demonstrate the ‘complexity, proof, detachment and irony’ expected of academic writing. (12)” (57).

From her advanced comp class, Dively gives the example of a “future seminary student” who wrote an “analysis of the differing rituals of baptism practiced by various Christian denominations and the Bible passages in which those perspectives are grounded.” [LDM – yes yes yes! That’s exactly what I was thinking mainly when I read Goodburn – that one pedagogical method would be to show the complexity WITHIN even a student’s own tradition. Perhaps one of the (many) reasons some students DO write about religion simplistically is that they are usually asked to write about it as a monolithic thing, or they are given no help at all to see religion as anything but a monolithic thing, and that then, when they write about religion, say, compared to something else, they end up oversimplifying – in the same way someone writing about postmodernism might oversimplify it when contrasting it with another worldview, or when summarizing it for an unfamiliar audience.]

Dively summarizes and uses the data from her two-year study (the one she did for her dissertation) to provide examples / evidence of students writing about religion quite non-dualistically, not simplistically. She even admits that she had assumed, hypothesized that “a considerable majority” of the drafts WOULD exhibit simplistic thinking.  But she was surprised to find that “approximately half of the fifty” drafts she collected “clearly disproved my hypothesis” (59)

Dively notes what we may be missing by disallowing religious topics: interesting essays, students’ chance to engage in “personally illuminating” as well as “intellectually and rhetorically challenging” topics, and, at the end of the article, adds that when we ban religious topics we miss “an opportunity to discuss a brand of discourse that is noticeably prevalent in American culture…” (65). [YES! I think that is the strongest reason to include religious topics: it will HELP democracy.]

She also reports on students’ attitudes toward religious inquiry as shown in a questionnaire.  A “few” of the 50 students felt the topic was too personal. The “remaining” enjoyed the chance.  The “greatest appeal” was the chance to clarify one’s own beliefs. (64).

Another appeal was the “rhetorical challenge of addressing highly sensitive subject matter in a text targeted for a heterogeneous audience. Students citing this appeal felt that the emotionally charged nature of religious conviction laid ground for a valuable exercise in avoiding non-biased expression and generalization [non-biased?]” (65). [LDM – YES YES YES. Cf Carter.]

After thoughts. Just occurred to me is that one reason instructors make this assumption, buy into this stereotype, is that fundamentalism is so publicized, so controversial – since the 1920s, when it started, but also especially since the whole moral majority thing, the fall of the television evangelists (1980s), the culture wars (1990s to present), the rise in influence of the religious right, etc.

REASONS instructors ban religious topics:
1)    sense of defending barrier between church and state
2)    “save themselves much consternation and hard work” (Dively 57)
3)    dislike of religion and/or religionists themselves (Reed!)
4)    simple lack of interest

NOTES ON Goodburn, Amy. “It’s a Question of Faith: Discourses of Fundamentalism and Critical Pedagogy in the Writing Classroom.” JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory (1998): 333-53.

purpose – to show an example of how religion accounts for ways that a student reads and writes about texts.
A university diversity requirement, English 300 The American Experience “at a large state university” (334).

Case study of “Luke” 19 year old sophomore majoring in English.  Goodburn uses two of his response papers to structure her analysis.

RESPONSE PAPER 1 — in response to Kristine Beatty’s poem “Lot’s Wife.” 337. Goodburn presented this reading and two others as a way of prompting students to exmine, intertextually, issues of gender. Beatty’s poem revises the biblical story, presents Lot’s wife valuing community over salvation. Luke sees the historical difference (biblical, 20th century); he disagrees with the poet on the level of history, on the poet’s interpretation of history. 338. “Luke relies on his own authority as a Biblical scholar to read – and resist reading – the poem in ways that I had not envisioned” (338).  [yep – using his own interpretation of the biblical story].

Goodburn calls in Marty and Appleby who point out that “one of the tenets of fundamentalist discourse is a reachng back to the past, either real or imagined, of original conditions and selecting or retrieving fundamental truths from that past in order to thwart the changing present (3)” (338). [LDM – well, Xty is, after all, a historical religion, based on historical revelation – so that’s not surprising. Would be the same in traditional forms of Islam and Judaism as well. Not unique to fundamentalism… though perhaps to traditional religion – which goes A LOT further back than fundamentalism which is a recent reaction to modernism.]

Luke argues that the biblical story “can only be understood within the context it was written,” and hence Luke thinks that any other reading is “naïve.”339  [LDM – I think that’s Luke saying another reading is illlogical, uncritical, uneducated. Traditional Xty assumes the past can be known well enough, accurately enough to give guidance to the present. Cf Handelman’s recounting of the history of literary theory and how before New Criticism, historicism (philology, lower text criticsm, etc) ruled literary study.]

Goodburn points out that Luke cannot accept a SITUATED reading from a 20th century perspective because it goes against his “OBJECTIVE” perspective. 339  SITUATED to Luke = revisionist, and revisionist = danger because they may lead to wrong / sinful actions / beliefs.

Luke is rejecting an interpretation rather than constructing one of his own. 339. Goodburn pulls in Boone to help her say that fundamentalists don’t “view texts as offering multiple readings – there are correct or incorrect readings of a text and those with moral authority have the ability to discern which reading is true” 339.  [LDM = Exegesis, kind of, can be correct or incorrect. Hermeneutics is situational.] [LDM – it’s a little overgeneralizing to say all fundamentalists don’t’ allow multiple readings. It depends on what text you’re talking about – a “creedal” text or an adiaphora text. AND one pedagogical strategy might well be then to show students the thousands of examples of multiple readings allowed (sometimes encouraged) WITHIN fundamentalist – or more broadly, conservative – discourse communities, to give them the freedom from WITHIN their tradition to present a divergent reading as well as to read divergent readings. Anyone who studies the history of exegesis – or even just the last 30 years -- will see 1) the multiple readings within one tradition (say, within Calvinism or Roman Catholicism)) at one time period, and 2) the multiple readings within one tradition OVER time.]

Other characteristics Goodburn notes: 1) teacher as enemy, secular humanist as bad word; 2) gender as an issue but quickly subsumed under issue of individual salvation (in other words, gender matters but not half as much as salvation does which solves the whole problem (?) anyway); 3) individual salvation over community [LDM -- this I think is characteristic of 20th century American fundamentalism – it’s not a characteristic of religion – in fact, it’s almost a complete opposite to the view of traditional Judaism, early Christianity, Christianity up until industrial revolution? (and Isalm?).] 340

RESPONSE PAPER 2 – Luke’s response to poem “Para Teresa” 341. Luke identified with the one who, as he said in his response, “as with all heroes they seem to fall under criticism for the choices they make” (qtd on 341).  Since Luke views individuals and salvation as the major compartments for thought (my terms), he sees the poem as an example of what an individual can do with hard work, even if a minority. Goodburn also sees his response as commentary on his role in her class. 342

[LDM – Luke is successfully making a personal connection with the poem – cf Rosenblatt’s four stances / stages – but he doesn’t get to a distancing or critical stage.]  Goodburn doesn’t say it this way but Luke views himself the way the biblical tradition views, say, Daniel in the lions’ den – resisting easy path, resisting secular influences will be rewarded with salvation. 342

Salvation = “rejecting community norms for the perceived greater good – in this case “the respect and the security of being a white person” (343).  [Yikes, this is sad. But, again, it is a characteristic of American Xty, not Xty as a whole. Why not have him read all the parts of the OT and NT that show – obviously, even to him – that the assumption of the biblical writers was community = salvation. All this individualism emphasis is very recent.]

FINAL COLLABORATIVE PROJECT – Luke wants to do paper on euthanasia, how it’s always wrong. 344. Goodburn discusses the way in which Luke could not adopt the same purpose (as Goodburn’s) for the assignment: i.e., to present multiple perspectives. Luke felt that to present multiple perspectives is tantamount to saying they are valid. “Not everyone is tolerable.” [LDM – Maybe just have him describe and analyze the difference either between himself and his teacher or between himself and authors? Nah, he doesn’t buy into the NEED to do that kind of examination. He needs to think rhetorically, and try to persuade another person.]

Goodburn’s pedagogical strategy – ask him probing questions (in her comments on his papers). {LDM – how about having him analyze a critical work by a PhD in his own tradition?] 345

LUKE’S PORTFOLIO / REVISIONS (or lack thereof)
Luke thinks Goodburn’s comments are “biased because they reflect [her] own positions” 345  His view, also, is that content of thinking should not be graded – only mechanical stuff and development of ideas.
[LDM – Luke couldn’t buy into Goodburn’s goal. But if the goal was “convince someone else,” if it was rhetorical, he would have HAD to examine his views and his language and tone, etc etc much more tightly.]

Goodburn refers fairly often to “Luke’s assumption that biblical authority provides him with correct views,” (346) and I kept wanting to add that it is Luke’s INTERPRETATION of biblical authority. Of course, she knows that as well as I do. So why not present him with the obvious fact that his view of authority is not constant? I mean, it is – his view that there IS such a thing as a god, as an authority, that is consistent within religion, of course. But his view that human understanding of that authority is constant is, even in his tradition, just not true.

Problem, of course, as Goodburn points out, is that he views tolerating difference includes valuing difference. And he’s right that Goodburn’s goal was to get him to VALUE difference. But he doesn’t necessarily have to VALUE difference to tolerate it.  Cf Yagelski – There was no real encounter between student and teacher. Tolerating does not equal valuing – as Yagelski himself evidences – he tolerated David while he continued to disagree with his views.

Goodburn asks “Is it possible to enact a critical pedagogy in a classroom where students do not view knowledge as partial and situated?” GOOD QUESTION. LDM – Teachers have to recognize that knowledge is NOT ONLY partial and situated, or at least TOLERATE that view.

Goodburn notes the commonalities between fundamentalism and critical pedagogy:
1)    oppositional stance, 2) critique of mass culture, 3) questioning of the nature of authority, 4) examination of sources of knowledge and believe, and 5) desire to convert the “other”. 348

Goodburn wants to say that we have to resist oversimplifying fundamentalist discourse and “understand that reading and writing are sociopolitical acts. [Fundamentalists] know that interpretations cannot be separated from their web of reality. But because they do not view their webs in terms of the social matrixes that Kincheloe identifies as central, their interpretations are considered naïve and uncritical [just as Luke viewed the poet’s reading of the Lot story as naïve and uncritical]” 349

Critical pedagogy == differences in epistemology come from differences in race, class, gender, etc.
Fundamentalism == differences in epistemology come from differences of secular or sacred.
–  both of these are choices, on both sides
“Instead, they believe that their web of reality – one that theorizes in terms of secular and religious-based differences – is the most useful in understanding and critiquing educational practicies. In many ways, the responses of students with fundamentalist beliefs serve as a mirror (albeit some critical educators might suggest a dark one) that reflects the principes of critical pedagogy from a different location” (340). [YES]

Goodburn points out that Pat Bizzell argues that critical pedagogues need to “construct a progressive authority that constructs and values knowledge” (349).  YES.

Goodburn’s suggestions for what she could have done with Luke:
1)    ask him to examine the stakes more, 2) ask him to address the difficulties he has in reading the poem, 3) map out his daily conflicts re his faith… basically examine how he negotiates his faith against opposition…350 “using religious beliefs as a site for analysis”. 351 [LDM but these strategies won’t work very well if he doesn’t buy into the goal of them. Better to have him examine them with the goal of persuading someone else or something like that.]

Goodburn: “the faith I had in the discourse of critical pedagogy did not call into question my own complicity in creating oppressive classroom relations” 351

NOTES ON… Yagelski, Robert P. “Religion and Conformity in the Writing Classroom.” Radical Teacher 35 (Summer 1988): 26-29.

Y tells story of his interaction with David, a “born again” student, to make two points: one, that honesty between teacher and student is key; and two, that tolerance and tolerating (i.e., resisting making others conform) includes radical religion as well as radical anything else.

Y helped David think of his audience (his fellow students mainly). David resisted, “maintaining that nobody who did not share such an experience could understand it fully” (27). [again, difference in epistemology].

In truth, I was tacitly trying to convince [David] that he was wrong, that the color of the world was my gray, not his black and white. (27)

I was a “good” teacher. I was doing to David what my teachers had done so well to me, what Richard Ohmann describes as shaping students into conformists who learn the bounds of dissent that are tolerate in our society (1976). Moreover, I was using the class workshop group to accomplish this: the class group was the vehicle whereby the consensus view of David’s beliefs as “radical,” or outside these bounds of dissent, was set forth.

Here I am using the term, consensus, as Greg Myers has used it (1986). Myers points out that the classroom community is an extention of the larger society and the ideology on which that society is based. In my little classroom community, the workshop group drove home to David in no uncertain terms that his strident fundamentalism, despite his inalienable right to believe in it, was not accepted by the majority, that in fact the majority was offended by it. The group also indicated that David’s bombastic methods were just as unacceptable. Do those views of David’s beliefs and methods reflect the larger society? I think yes. WHat is perceived as religious fanatacism — or any fanatacism — is rarely encouraged in our country. A figure like Jerry Falwell may be offensive in his role as self-proclaim statesman for American fundamentalism, but even he usually stays within the bounds of polite argument that we associate with political and social debate in this country. Keep in mind the uproar Falwell touched off in 1986 when he called Bishop Tuto a phony. (27)

Y also discusses example of Ted Koppel on Nightline moderating debates and “keeping the anger suppressed” (27).

“Teaching conformity is easy, true tolerance is not” (28).

How to work against the structure of conformity? Easy way would be “use what students know and believe to get their attention and keep their attention… and leave it at that” (28).  Another example of this conformity-ideology: group called Accuracy in Academia creating list of “too radical” teachers, and influences on both sides of political spectrum at UNH – don’t be too liberal, don’t be too conservative. Message = keep your ideology out of the classroom if it does not conform.  Same thing applies to religious thought.

David learned “not because I am a good teacher of writing, but because I tried to remain honest with him throughout” (28).  “He recognized that, despite my godless views, I wanted him to improve as a writer” (29). David gave Y a listen, somtimes considering his suggestions (though he never changed his mind in any substantive way).  Task = to challenge him.

Y ends by implying that there are probably better ways to get a student like David to re-assess his views but that in the end teachers “can only be honest” (29).

LDM — Yes, the honesty creates an authentic encounter, and anytime, people encounter each other honestly, and with each other’s best interests in mind, something intellectual or emotionally or spiritually good is going to happen.  Was also thinking about how in the end there’s always a dominant ideology. And in Yagelski’s classroom, it is an ideology of critical consciousness (for lack of a more accurate description of what I mean). Wonder what would be different if David had encountered Yagelski in a non-dominant position, if Y had been just a friend or friend’s friend. He probably wouldn’t have listened at all — unless the two of them established some other kind of relationship that formed ground for interest in each other’s views. Which thought brings me back again to Y’s emphasis on honesty. Honesty as creat0r-of-relationship, at least SOME form of relationship, and that relationship as being what facilitates some breakthroughs: David giving Y a listen, David learning perhaps a bit about how to write to an audience that disagrees with him, and David’s resistance sparking in Y a reflection on his own teaching and on conformity and tolerance.