We had a bit of a scare a few weeks ago. As any consistent reader of our robot/cyborg army thread is aware, we have been slowly plugging away, quietly building our robot army. While some early plans were made public at the end of the last semester, the extent of our plans have flown under the radar for the most part. Then some serious storms blew through Kutztown and knocked out the stealth cloaking device we have our on robot army headquarters. For almost a day, our headquarters were exposed for all to see.

I know, it’s not a whole lot to look at, but we did the best we can. We are, after all, the emergent group in the English department. And frankly, there is not a whole lot of funding available for robot/cyborg army building.

We actually got some of our inspiration from Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. “Clones” had a nice irony to it. After all, the lingering dominant logic concerning writing and the teaching of writing is an assembly-line logic. Produce thousands of identical skill sets for the marketplace even though our globalized, digitized economy doesn’t work on that model any longer. Somehow, concepts of literacy–especially at non-elite colleges and universities–are still cast in an industrial mold. Perhaps this comes from the class distinctions still reinforced in our stratified (higher) education system. Perhaps it’s what Edward Bernays called the “retrogressive force” of tradition.

In any case, given the recent “budget shortfalls” for the PA State System of Higher Education–of which Kutztown is a part–I suspect that CRLS will be a punk ethic/DIY project. We will have to slowly reverse that assembly line model of how writing/literacy is articulated as well as slowly introduce our robot army into the department and university. In a perfect world, we could have created an HQ that called to mind Tipoca City on Kamino from Attack of the Clones. However, we quickly found that such an undertaking was non in the budget. So we settled for our little shrouded piecemeal HQ pictured above.

So, it’s July 21st now. That means just about a month before the semester begins. Time to shift gears and get back to building. It really has been quite a summer so far…and at the same time, I am looking forward to all this year promises.

Partly cloudy. 84 degrees. Slight chance of thunderstorms.

After a nice five days in the mountains, I am returning to this electronic space to revise a draft of some of my reading. While it is true that the bulk of my time in the mountains was spent doing mountainy things, part of relaxing is having the time to read more of what I want to read. The last several weeks of any semester always take a toll on reading. Or should I say, reading anything other than student papers.

I read the bulk of Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum. I say “the bulk of” because I have yet to read Sections III and IV which can only be found on the included CD-ROM. But, given that the concept of “the book” is still wedded to the printed page, I am willing to say I “read the book” while still quite aware that I have still have two sections of the book to read. In any case, the part of the book that I read has given me a whole lot to think about. As it turns out, I was in the mood for thinking about building, constructing, or, in that lovely neo-capitalist turn of phrase, “growing” our composition program.

snippets:

• On Lynn Bloom’s essay, “Advancing Composition” [in Coming of Age]

I thought it was telling that over the 50 years of discussions seeking to define “advanced composition,” she found that there was a consistent inability to come to a consensus concerning what “advanced composition” or the advanced composition curriculum is or should do. But what I found more interesting is that she notes that “The conventional academic faculty–not TAs and part-timers who teach freshman composition–with an academic orientation are the usual teachers of advanced composition” (Bloom 16); while at the same time, many of the courses and textbooks she surveyed were difficult to distinguish from the first year composition courses. Hogan’s survey of 311 American colleges and universities in 1980 and Shumaker, Dennis, and Green’s 1990 survey revealed at best little connection between “advanced” composition and the first year course (6, 12).

On the one hand, it makes sense why there would be little consensus among composition faculty at different institutions about what advanced composition is given the lack of an established “discipline” until fairly recently. However, what is more puzzling is the lack of connections between the first year course and the advanced course at each institution. That is, it seems puzzling that faculty would not thinking about the relationship between composition and advanced composition when they were creating the course.

That brings me back to the question: who is teaching composition? Bloom’s recognition that “conventional faculty” teach advanced composition, is also a recognition that “non-conventional faculty”–i.e. TAs and contingent faculty–are the one’s teaching composition at most colleges and universities. While certainly not a new observation, this fact only returns us to the unavoidable need of making labor issues an integral part of the construction of any undergraduate composition concentration/major. That is, I think one of the key reasons that there is a persistent disconnect between advanced composition and the first year course is because the same people are not teaching both courses.

And, frankly, the necessity to integrate labor issues into curricular development becomes even more so today. As Marc Bousquet so nicely lays out in How the University Works,

Thirty-five years ago, nearly 75 percent of all college teachers were tenurable; only a quarter worked on an adjunct, part-time, or non-tenurable basis. Today, those proportions are reversed. If you’re enrolled in four college classes right now, you have a pretty good chance that one of the four will be taught by someone who has earned a doctorate and whose teaching, scholarship, and service to the profession has undergone the intensive peer scrutiny associated with the tenure system. (Bousquet 2)

In this world, one can see those calls to “abolish” first year composition courses as an attempt to (as I have argued in another context) out-source service courses.

• Thomas Miller’s essay, “Rhetoric Within and Without Composition” [in Coming of Age]

Reading Miller’s essay felt, at times, like talking to a kindred spirit. I can’t count the number of times I’ve argued along similar lines. At the heart of his essay is a call for civic literacy: “This civic domain is the field of study that I hope rhetoric will reclaim as it expands its frame of reference beyond first-year composition courses” (39). Given that I want to leave campus and go home soon, I’m going to just post this longish passage from his essay that seems integral to developing our CRLS concentration:

A critical awareness of the process of constructing shared beliefs is essential to a civic philosophy of rhetoric that makes sense of what we value. The contradictions contained within this process mark the sites of controversy that can evoke a dialectical awareness of the negotiation of morals and mores. As students examine what is up for debate, how it was called into question, and why it is useful to view the debate from multiple standpoints, they can learn to value critical reflection as a means to practical action, rather than an end in itself. Students can develop this rhetorical stance by reflecting on their expectations about a text and its expectations about them, the experiences that validate and challenge those expectations, and the codifications of those experiences in discursive, moral, and social conventions. In other words, students can learn to question what is assumed, where those assumptions come from, and what gives them authority. If these are to be rhetorical questions, their answers must include action. Critical judgment is generally understood to be the end of inquiry within English departments, as elsewhere in the academy–which is, after all, a product of the Enlightenment–but our own tradition treats critical thinking as a prelude to practical action. (Miller 40, italics mine)

I’m checking out for the day.

Mostly cloudy with breaks of sun, 56 degrees.

…and then there’s this statement by the National Council of Teachers of English:

Toward A Definition of 21st-Century Literacies
Adopted by the NCTE Executive Committee
February 15, 2008

Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities and social trajectories of individuals and groups. Twenty-first century readers and writers need to

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and
cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of
purposes
• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous
information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

While falling a little short of the kind of project suggested by the multiliteracies folks, NCTE’s statement does support the kind of hybrid/cyborg approach to CRLS. Interesting.

Cloudy, spitting rain, 69 degrees.

The end of the semester is for the most part here. Students are finishing project, papers, and exams. And faculty are knee deep in grading. And as I sit at my desk reading and responding to student papers, I am having my android dreams of the robot army to come.

In particular, I am thinking about hybrids…cyborgs to be more precise. Cyborgs that cross disciplinary boundaries and who neither respect, nor desire, disciplinary fortifications. That does not mean that cyborgs are wishy-washy about their agenda or intellectual commitments. No, cyborgs just start from a different place.

In fact, the whole “literacies” family of CURLS robots is a little underdeveloped in the whole scheme of things. The more I think about it, the more I think that cyborgs are more fitting than robots when it comes to literacies. Take digital rhetorics/literacies, for example. On the one hand, we could develop a robot that would approach its task from the rhetoric angle–and do it quite well. However, digital writing/design bleeds into several other areas–even in the immediate family: desktop pub, info design, and media studies, for example. So, when thinking about designing a “digital rhetoric” robot, it would make more sense to turn to a cyborg.

Such a proposal will be tricky, though. After all, cyborgs do not exactly have a glowing reputation–think Blade Runner, Terminator, and, of course, the Borg–Donna Haraway notwithstanding. But an interesting way of approaching the task at hand, methinks. Diversify the robot army.

Yes, it’s the end of the semester.

Yes, I’m punchy.

Sunny skies, low humidity, 78 degrees.

Ah yes. A robot army. How else defend planet Earth against alien invaders, ninjas, and zombies. Last night, I studied how to befriend an unfamiliar robot. Tonight, I think I’ll look into riding mechanized calvary. What? Yup. You can thank University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign-bound-student Allie for this. Yes, outstanding English major that she is handed me the manual yesterday. I can’t think of a better way to ease my way into summer! Thanks Allie!

I think I am going to adopt “a robot army” to refer to another project I’ve started to work on with one of my comp comrades. What is this mysterious project worthy of Area 51 designation you ask??? Well, I’ll confess from the onset that it’s not going to be all that interesting to anyone who is not a comp/rhet geek (or at least an academic geek). The project is to build a comp/rhet concentration within our English major.

We now have four, count ‘em four, composition and rhetoric faculty in our department and we’ll be posting a job for #5 in the fall. This is good. But hiring new composition faculty has posed other questions for me, namely: What kind of professional opportunities will there be for new faculty? What kind of courses will they want to develop and where will those courses fit in the overall picture of our program? What is the identity of our little composition-engine-that-could?

So, for the past several months I’ve been poking around looking for info on undergraduate composition majors and concentrations. Most recently I’ve been making my way through Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum. and getting more and more convinced of the importance of an intellectual and institutional space for our composition program. As I wrote and rewrote the previous sentence, I grappled for how to phrase what I’m getting at. I started with “an intellectual and institutional center,” then “focal point.” But neither of those (not to mention the multiple versions of that sentence that are now part of the virtual shadow) really made sense.

You see, I think the most accurate way to describe what we have tried to do in the composition program is to emphasize “conversation” as the model of our program. That is, there is not one direction, one set of principles, but an agreement as to the importance of talking about and discussing student writing, composition and rhetoric as a field, and different ways of approaching our work. A program that encourages differences.

That’s how I’ve thought about it anyway. But, to be honest, it’s not an approach that we’ve sat down and agreed upon or committed to. Our comp/rhet conversation is an approach that developed more or less organically…perhaps indicated some of the implicit commitments we all shared as individuals and members of the bigger comp/rhet conversation. Several of us have developed courses, revised old ones, and done some pretty cool stuff in our classes. Two of us regularly use blogs for example. We have weekly composition conversation and will begin year three of our reading group next fall. So, all in all we’ve been a pretty active bunch.

But, for me , I find myself wanting to take the next step and formalize (not a good word) our inquiry around a concentration/minor/major of some sort. Part of this has to do with seeing some of our best students take an interest in composition and rhetoric after taking classes with one of us. Part of of has to do with the kind of shift in literacies that Kathleen Blake Yancey pointed out. And I think it would be fun. Yes, fun. Comp/rhet geeks like this kind of stuff.

Anyway, I should get back to grading. Last week of the semester this is (that’s my Yoda dialect). More soon!