7/29/2007
weekend
The weekend brought a little break from my recent 'civic engagement' reading frenzy. Friday night Nicole and I met our good friends Jim and Janice for dinner and then they came back to our place and played cards until one a.m. Saturday Nicole had several client meetings at her office so I tagged along and got some reading done (ok, the weekend hasn't been a total break). Last night we watched the first disc of season two of Weeds, the excellent and often twisted series about a pot-selling soccer mom. Today after church, I've got some vegetable soup brewing on the stove. For some reason, I love soup in the summertime. Probably has to do with all the fresh vegetables that abound. Today's soup boasts carrots, celery, onion, garlic, zucchini, cauliflower, corn (right off the cob), some of Anna's home-dried hot pepper flakes, and a big handful of barley. The barley comes from my new 'stuff to use up before moving' cupboard.
7/26/2007
new blog up and running
I've begun posting reading notes over at my other webspace. The site you're on right now will still be my regular, day-to-day blog, but the other site will be thoughts, ideas, and (mostly) reading notes as I start to work on my new project. I just got my IRB approval today for the new research, which will take place this fall in conjunction with the 'Writing for Civic Literacy' class.
Last year, an oral historian at UM-D, Georgina Hickey, and her students completed a Civic Engagement Audit on our campus. One of their findings was that faculty and students had very different definitions of concepts like 'community' and 'civic duty.' Faculty had a lot of misconceptions about student perspectives, according to the audit, including the misconception that students didn't have time for or interest in community service, activism, etc. Students, on the other hand, expressed some level of committment to these things. This disconnect seems to cry out for further elaboration. Hence the present research.
Students in my class are going to be doing project-based community service work, doing professional writing projects for a residential foster facility in Detroit. They'll also be writing reflectively about their experience and analytically about the social issues they engage with at the site. I plan to study the writing they do (especially the reflective stuff), and also to conduct interviews with students throughout the term, to try to understand what students think of notions of civics.
So I've been doing some reading this summer in anticipation of the project. Although the posts at my other site are mostly ways for me to chart what I'm reading, feel free to check it out.
Last year, an oral historian at UM-D, Georgina Hickey, and her students completed a Civic Engagement Audit on our campus. One of their findings was that faculty and students had very different definitions of concepts like 'community' and 'civic duty.' Faculty had a lot of misconceptions about student perspectives, according to the audit, including the misconception that students didn't have time for or interest in community service, activism, etc. Students, on the other hand, expressed some level of committment to these things. This disconnect seems to cry out for further elaboration. Hence the present research.
Students in my class are going to be doing project-based community service work, doing professional writing projects for a residential foster facility in Detroit. They'll also be writing reflectively about their experience and analytically about the social issues they engage with at the site. I plan to study the writing they do (especially the reflective stuff), and also to conduct interviews with students throughout the term, to try to understand what students think of notions of civics.
So I've been doing some reading this summer in anticipation of the project. Although the posts at my other site are mostly ways for me to chart what I'm reading, feel free to check it out.
7/25/2007
lookin' for a home
Tonight Nicole and I looked at five houses and didn't really fall in love with any of them. Probably a good thing. We fell in love with an old Victorian home in Ohio four years ago and ended up 1) spending more than we should have, and 2) losing money when we sold the place two years later. We're not too picky. A dining room and a decent-sized kitchen are musts, but, aside from that, we're open to possibilities. Nothing in a subdivision! Nothing in a neighborhood where you choose from three or four different stepford wife floorplans! You can find some nice colonials from the 1920s in Royal Oak: nice woodwork, maybe some built-in bookshelves. Our realtor is surprised that we *prefer* such homes. Little did he know that every article of clothing I was wearing tonight, aside from the ratty, six-year-old Converse all-stars, came from garage sales. What a shame that, as a culture, our wastefulness has even made its way into the real estate realm. Even with the sorry state of Michigan's economy (thanks W!), older homes seem to mean "starter homes." As in, "this is a nice place to get you guys started." Sigh.
Control
Anton Corbijn's 'Control'--a biopic about Joy Division singer Ian Curtis--got a lot of attention at Cannes. Wish there was a U.S. release date for the film.
7/24/2007
tentative syllaus for Composition 364
Composition 364: Writing for Civic Literacy
(Cross-Listed: Communication 364, English 364)
Required Text: Donald Lazere, Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy
“Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.” –Marian Wright Edelman
Welcome to Writing for Civic Literacy, a course designed to empower you to use high-level literacy skills to become more engaged with the world around you. You will study how politicians, members of the media, and critical citizens use language to inform others, advance agendas, and promote social issues. You will learn genres of writing—including semantic analysis and argument—that will help you become a more active citizen. You will perform community service in Metro Detroit and use that experience as an object of analysis, researching the social context in which community agencies operate and critically situating your observations of the work sites. Finally, you will collaborate with your classmates and with community agencies on real-world writing projects.
Academic Service Learning
The National Service Learning Clearinghouse writes, “Service learning is a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities.” Students in academic service learning courses perform hands-on work at non-profit agencies like soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and other sites and connect that experience to concepts they are learning in the classroom. Academic service learning is not volunteering; rather, students learn by doing and gain a more sophisticated understanding of academic concepts by applying knowledge in a real setting. Further, service learning instills a sense of civic duty in students by providing you with resources, confidence, and a knowledge base for engaging with pressing community needs.
This course has a service learning component. You are required to spend ten hours during the course of the semester engaged in direct service (i.e., performing hands-on work) for our community partner or another community agency of your choosing. If you opt to serve a site other than our community partner, I ask that you have your agency approved by me as early in the term as possible. In addition to the ten hours of direct service, you will collaborate with your classmates and with the agency in project-based work—completing a meaningful writing project that fulfills an agency need. You may complete the project-based work with our community partner or with another agency of your choosing. If you choose to complete a project with an agency other than our community partner, please have the project approved by me as early in the term as possible.
Community Partner
St. Peter’s Home for Boys — http://www.sphb.org/ — is a residential foster care facility where teen-aged boys live and, in some cases, go to school. Located on Joy Road on Detroit’s southwest side (about a ten-minute drive from campus, north on Southfield and then east on Joy), SPHB provides a residence for about 25 wards of state, many of whom come from abusive or neglectful homes. Some go offsite to public schools and some remain onsite for GED and/or basic skills courses. SPHB relies on public and private sources of funding and also on the services of volunteers who tutor residents, organize programs and activities like golf and chess, and maintain the facility.
SPHB has graciously agreed to partner with our class, providing a real-world laboratory for learning about how social service agencies meet community needs. SPHB will also provide students a forum in which to complete writing projects, thereby aiding in your ability to become more literate and giving you valuable experience that you may put on a resume or graduate/law/medical school application. The writing that you complete will also become a valuable addition to a portfolio, an invaluable component of job applications in fields like public relations, journalism, publishing, and education.
Ethical service learning relationships rely on the concept of reciprocity. In other words, the relationship works both ways. SBHB provides you with many valuable opportunities for meaningful learning as well as professional growth and advancement and you reciprocate by provide them with labor. Both your direct service and your project-based service must be meaningful and substantial. You should make good faith efforts to meet the needs of the agency and, by extension, the boys they serve and the broader community.
Assignments/Grading Scale
Your workload in Composition 364 primarily consists of three sets of tasks:
1. Completing assigned readings and preparing for class discussions
This should be self-explanatory. Read critically and be prepared to discuss readings from our course text.
2. Performing community service and completing your Real-World Writing Project
Complete at least ten hours of direct service at SPHB. This might include tutoring, cleaning up the ground, or any other tasks. You may perform this service individually or in groups. Maintain a community service journal in which you record experiences, observations, frustrations, and victories as a volunteer. I’ll collect your journal periodically during the term. Further, in consultation with the SPHB staff, plan and carry out a writing project that will be of use to the agency. This might include a series of articles or other content for the SPHB website, a SPHB newsletter, or a legislative advocacy plan.
3. Complete a semester-long inquiry on a social issue of your choosing
Do some research on an issue related to the work you are doing at SPHB. You might want to research the implications of non-profits shifting to a business model. Or you might want to look into changes in state funding to social services. Other issues might include problems with foster care in Michigan, the racial dynamics of the foster system, violence and “boys culture” in contemporary society, and so forth. Gather research materials and maintain an annotated
bibliography of your sources. Analyze those sources in two mini-papers (‘Semantic Analysis’ and ‘Political Bias Analysis Paper’). Complete a researched argument of your own by the end of the term.
Grading Scale:
Reflection Journal 5%
Real World Writing Project 30%
Semantic Analysis 15%
Annotated Bibliography 10%
Political Bias Analysis 15%
Researched Argument 25%
(Cross-Listed: Communication 364, English 364)
Required Text: Donald Lazere, Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy
“Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.” –Marian Wright Edelman
Welcome to Writing for Civic Literacy, a course designed to empower you to use high-level literacy skills to become more engaged with the world around you. You will study how politicians, members of the media, and critical citizens use language to inform others, advance agendas, and promote social issues. You will learn genres of writing—including semantic analysis and argument—that will help you become a more active citizen. You will perform community service in Metro Detroit and use that experience as an object of analysis, researching the social context in which community agencies operate and critically situating your observations of the work sites. Finally, you will collaborate with your classmates and with community agencies on real-world writing projects.
Academic Service Learning
The National Service Learning Clearinghouse writes, “Service learning is a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities.” Students in academic service learning courses perform hands-on work at non-profit agencies like soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and other sites and connect that experience to concepts they are learning in the classroom. Academic service learning is not volunteering; rather, students learn by doing and gain a more sophisticated understanding of academic concepts by applying knowledge in a real setting. Further, service learning instills a sense of civic duty in students by providing you with resources, confidence, and a knowledge base for engaging with pressing community needs.
This course has a service learning component. You are required to spend ten hours during the course of the semester engaged in direct service (i.e., performing hands-on work) for our community partner or another community agency of your choosing. If you opt to serve a site other than our community partner, I ask that you have your agency approved by me as early in the term as possible. In addition to the ten hours of direct service, you will collaborate with your classmates and with the agency in project-based work—completing a meaningful writing project that fulfills an agency need. You may complete the project-based work with our community partner or with another agency of your choosing. If you choose to complete a project with an agency other than our community partner, please have the project approved by me as early in the term as possible.
Community Partner
St. Peter’s Home for Boys — http://www.sphb.org/ — is a residential foster care facility where teen-aged boys live and, in some cases, go to school. Located on Joy Road on Detroit’s southwest side (about a ten-minute drive from campus, north on Southfield and then east on Joy), SPHB provides a residence for about 25 wards of state, many of whom come from abusive or neglectful homes. Some go offsite to public schools and some remain onsite for GED and/or basic skills courses. SPHB relies on public and private sources of funding and also on the services of volunteers who tutor residents, organize programs and activities like golf and chess, and maintain the facility.
SPHB has graciously agreed to partner with our class, providing a real-world laboratory for learning about how social service agencies meet community needs. SPHB will also provide students a forum in which to complete writing projects, thereby aiding in your ability to become more literate and giving you valuable experience that you may put on a resume or graduate/law/medical school application. The writing that you complete will also become a valuable addition to a portfolio, an invaluable component of job applications in fields like public relations, journalism, publishing, and education.
Ethical service learning relationships rely on the concept of reciprocity. In other words, the relationship works both ways. SBHB provides you with many valuable opportunities for meaningful learning as well as professional growth and advancement and you reciprocate by provide them with labor. Both your direct service and your project-based service must be meaningful and substantial. You should make good faith efforts to meet the needs of the agency and, by extension, the boys they serve and the broader community.
Assignments/Grading Scale
Your workload in Composition 364 primarily consists of three sets of tasks:
1. Completing assigned readings and preparing for class discussions
This should be self-explanatory. Read critically and be prepared to discuss readings from our course text.
2. Performing community service and completing your Real-World Writing Project
Complete at least ten hours of direct service at SPHB. This might include tutoring, cleaning up the ground, or any other tasks. You may perform this service individually or in groups. Maintain a community service journal in which you record experiences, observations, frustrations, and victories as a volunteer. I’ll collect your journal periodically during the term. Further, in consultation with the SPHB staff, plan and carry out a writing project that will be of use to the agency. This might include a series of articles or other content for the SPHB website, a SPHB newsletter, or a legislative advocacy plan.
3. Complete a semester-long inquiry on a social issue of your choosing
Do some research on an issue related to the work you are doing at SPHB. You might want to research the implications of non-profits shifting to a business model. Or you might want to look into changes in state funding to social services. Other issues might include problems with foster care in Michigan, the racial dynamics of the foster system, violence and “boys culture” in contemporary society, and so forth. Gather research materials and maintain an annotated
bibliography of your sources. Analyze those sources in two mini-papers (‘Semantic Analysis’ and ‘Political Bias Analysis Paper’). Complete a researched argument of your own by the end of the term.
Grading Scale:
Reflection Journal 5%
Real World Writing Project 30%
Semantic Analysis 15%
Annotated Bibliography 10%
Political Bias Analysis 15%
Researched Argument 25%
7/19/2007
keeping current: Teaching About Writing.
I do a fair amount of skimming of journal articles. Necessity, I suppose, but then I feel guilty when I read Entertainment Weekly cover-to-cover. I mean, if a journal article takes up issues related to class or race, critical pedagogy, open-admissions teaching, material rhetorics, civic rhetoric, or service learning, I'll almost certainly give the piece a thorough read. And I always at the very least familiarize myself with the arguments of articles in the journals I subscribe to (Rhetoric Review, jac, WPA, College English, TETYC, and CCC). But that familiarizing process sometimes involves the S word: skimming. However, the new issues of College English and CCC have a read 'em cover-to-cover appeal. And, in between grading OWP portfolios (I have one more to go!), I've worked my way though both (go me). Some thoughts:
Downs and Wardle, "Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning 'First-Year Composition' as 'Introduction to Writing Studies.'" CCC 58 (2007): 552-584. This one's getting massive amounts of attention on the WPA list. Downs and Wardle propose teaching comp as an intro to current research in the field of comp studies, and report early data from a series of pilot courses that do just that. Interesting stuff, but I wonder about the (too easy, too pat) analogy the authors make between comp and other introductory courses. The piece implies that introducing students to research in a given discipline is standard and/or default practice in 101-type courses. Not so in a lot of "foundational" type subject areas. Math and foriegn language courses seem comfortable (though I'm not aware of disciplinary debates in those worlds) with workshop and even how-to pedagogies.
Not that the analogy between comp and these courses is a perfect one, but, still, I think it's important to acknowelge that intro courses do a wide variety of things. And very few intro courses ask students to conduct primary disciplinary research in those fields (one of the big things that Downs and Wardle propose). Natural science courses, I suppose, do something like this in labs, but that kind of work seems more like kinesthetic strategies to illustrate scientific principles or do a scaled-down version of what chemists do. And social science courses, too, sometimes assign mini-ethnographies, for instance. So I see the analogy, to a degree. But my point is that the purpose of intro courses if often highly contested. Some intro psych courses have a humanistic pedagogy (let's read Man's Search for Meaning and talk about esoteric concerns) while some have a primary research pedagogy (let's get IRB approval and conduct experiments). Intro philosophy courses, I suspect (and I'm guessing here), are as varied as any disciplines' intro courses: some foreground argumentation, some foreground moral dilemmas, some take a literary or historical or survey approach, etc.
The piece offers a nice overview of misconceptions about writing, too, notably the mistaken notions that Academic Writing means something univeral or monolithic and that "skill" automatically transfers from a semester or two into other courses/contexts. Yes, these are misconceptions...but I don't know how the switch to "intro to writing studies" will fix this problem. I don't know if a switch in pedagogies will have such a seismic cultural (or even campus) impact. Especially given the unlikelihood (impossibility?) that this new curriculum will be universally adopted.
Finally, I question adopting this pedagogy as a means for improving the status of the field. A lot of folks don't understand or take seriously research in the field. True. And Downs/Wardle give some good instances of this, from goverment reports to for-profit standardized tests, both of which ignore our research and its implications. Yes, we all know colleagues on our campus who don't acknowledge disciplinary authority of rhet/comp (I've heard several people on my campus disparagingly say this about a rhet/comp person who used to work here: "she thought she was some kind of expert on writing"...DUH!! SHE WAS!!). We've got a p.r. problem, a political problem, and an authority problem. But I worry about changing teaching methods in order to 'send a message.' I'll speak out on committees (moreso once I have tenure). I'll urge my elected representatives to support education policy that's consistent with what we know about literacy. I'll criticizde standardized tests that are reductive and that hurt students. But I don't think I want to make curricular decisions for reasons aside from what I think will challenge students and benefit them in a variety of contexts. I don't think Downs/Wardle are against any of these things. On the contrary, I think they've developed strategies that are interesting and challenging. But the point remains: there's an ethical question here (one I would have liked to see the article contend with) when we're 'teaching to legitimize.'
Finally, and I'm going to reveal my own expressivist tendencies here, I'm not sure how these strategies get at the magic of language. I'm fresh off of my Writing Project work right now, so I'm probably allowing the expressivist side to speak more loudly than usual, but I do feel strongly about devoting some fy comp time to dealing with voice, expression, and, yes, creativity. I know this isn't a language that's widely accepted, but, I guess, at the end of the day, it's (part of) how I roll.
Would like to say more about Shannon Carter's piece on teaching in the Bible Belt in the new CE which is interesting, but time's short. Also highly recomended: Chaput and Powers on academic freedom, which is in CCC. Cathy Chaput's an old grad school mate of mine and does great work using marxist theory to look at the political economy of higher ed. In fact, U of Arizona's well-represented in the new CCC (go RCTE!).
Downs and Wardle, "Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning 'First-Year Composition' as 'Introduction to Writing Studies.'" CCC 58 (2007): 552-584. This one's getting massive amounts of attention on the WPA list. Downs and Wardle propose teaching comp as an intro to current research in the field of comp studies, and report early data from a series of pilot courses that do just that. Interesting stuff, but I wonder about the (too easy, too pat) analogy the authors make between comp and other introductory courses. The piece implies that introducing students to research in a given discipline is standard and/or default practice in 101-type courses. Not so in a lot of "foundational" type subject areas. Math and foriegn language courses seem comfortable (though I'm not aware of disciplinary debates in those worlds) with workshop and even how-to pedagogies.
Not that the analogy between comp and these courses is a perfect one, but, still, I think it's important to acknowelge that intro courses do a wide variety of things. And very few intro courses ask students to conduct primary disciplinary research in those fields (one of the big things that Downs and Wardle propose). Natural science courses, I suppose, do something like this in labs, but that kind of work seems more like kinesthetic strategies to illustrate scientific principles or do a scaled-down version of what chemists do. And social science courses, too, sometimes assign mini-ethnographies, for instance. So I see the analogy, to a degree. But my point is that the purpose of intro courses if often highly contested. Some intro psych courses have a humanistic pedagogy (let's read Man's Search for Meaning and talk about esoteric concerns) while some have a primary research pedagogy (let's get IRB approval and conduct experiments). Intro philosophy courses, I suspect (and I'm guessing here), are as varied as any disciplines' intro courses: some foreground argumentation, some foreground moral dilemmas, some take a literary or historical or survey approach, etc.
The piece offers a nice overview of misconceptions about writing, too, notably the mistaken notions that Academic Writing means something univeral or monolithic and that "skill" automatically transfers from a semester or two into other courses/contexts. Yes, these are misconceptions...but I don't know how the switch to "intro to writing studies" will fix this problem. I don't know if a switch in pedagogies will have such a seismic cultural (or even campus) impact. Especially given the unlikelihood (impossibility?) that this new curriculum will be universally adopted.
Finally, I question adopting this pedagogy as a means for improving the status of the field. A lot of folks don't understand or take seriously research in the field. True. And Downs/Wardle give some good instances of this, from goverment reports to for-profit standardized tests, both of which ignore our research and its implications. Yes, we all know colleagues on our campus who don't acknowledge disciplinary authority of rhet/comp (I've heard several people on my campus disparagingly say this about a rhet/comp person who used to work here: "she thought she was some kind of expert on writing"...DUH!! SHE WAS!!). We've got a p.r. problem, a political problem, and an authority problem. But I worry about changing teaching methods in order to 'send a message.' I'll speak out on committees (moreso once I have tenure). I'll urge my elected representatives to support education policy that's consistent with what we know about literacy. I'll criticizde standardized tests that are reductive and that hurt students. But I don't think I want to make curricular decisions for reasons aside from what I think will challenge students and benefit them in a variety of contexts. I don't think Downs/Wardle are against any of these things. On the contrary, I think they've developed strategies that are interesting and challenging. But the point remains: there's an ethical question here (one I would have liked to see the article contend with) when we're 'teaching to legitimize.'
Finally, and I'm going to reveal my own expressivist tendencies here, I'm not sure how these strategies get at the magic of language. I'm fresh off of my Writing Project work right now, so I'm probably allowing the expressivist side to speak more loudly than usual, but I do feel strongly about devoting some fy comp time to dealing with voice, expression, and, yes, creativity. I know this isn't a language that's widely accepted, but, I guess, at the end of the day, it's (part of) how I roll.
Would like to say more about Shannon Carter's piece on teaching in the Bible Belt in the new CE which is interesting, but time's short. Also highly recomended: Chaput and Powers on academic freedom, which is in CCC. Cathy Chaput's an old grad school mate of mine and does great work using marxist theory to look at the political economy of higher ed. In fact, U of Arizona's well-represented in the new CCC (go RCTE!).
another call to end the Iraq war
Look at the U.S. Catholic Bishops doing the right thing:
Not big news or anything. Though extremely conservative (the Catholic church's leadership and rank-and-file is much more liberal virtually everywhere else in the world, especially Europe and Latin America), the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has been extremely critical of the war, and of course the former Pope condemned the invasion--a condemnation that was mostly ignored by both the media and by U.S.American Catholics. But it's reassuring to see these kinds of statements, though I wonder how much moral authority and credibility U.S. Bishops have in many people's eyes, especially on the heels of the L.A. settlement.The U.S. bishops have agreed to meet with a group of Catholic House Democrats to
discuss how to pursue the goal of a "responsible transition" to end the war in
Iraq.They also reiterated their call for members of Congress and the Bush
administration to break the political stalemate in Washington and "forge
bipartisan policies on ways to bring about a responsible transition and an end
to the war.""The current situation in Iraq is unacceptable and unsustainable,"
wrote Bishop Thomas G. Wenski of Orlando, Fla., chairman of the bishops'
Committee on International Policy, in a July 17 letter to Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio.
A copy of the letter was released July 18 by the U.S. Conference of Catholic
Bishops.
7/17/2007
the abuse scandal
The Catholic Church's ongoing struggle with abusive and predatory priests returned to the news this week, as the L.A. archdiocese agreed on a $660 million settlement. By virtually all accounts, the diocese decided to settle because Cardinal Roger Mahony was about to be called to testify under oath. The diocese allowed the case to stretch on and on and on until faced with the inevitability of its leader being compelled to tell the truth in public. Mahony's involvement in covering up abuse is well-documented in the incredible film Deliver Us From Evil, one of the saddest pieces of work I've ever seen. It's difficult to watch, but I highly recommend it.
Time and again, the pattern in these cases is cover up the abuse, smear the victims, and claim anti-Catholic sentiment and anti-Catholic media are to blame. I've followed the abuse stories very closely in large part because my high school (a seminary boarding school) was at the center of one of the highest profile sex abuse scandals. We even made the cover of Time Magazine. The story broke in December of 1992, just six months after I graduated from the school. I was home from college for the holidays when a friend called and told me to put on CNN. A rather large group of former students brought pedophilia charges against several priests and brothers from the seminary, including a teacher who I had for U.S. History and Sociology and another teacher I had for Algebra 2 and Calculus. I was shocked, never having witnessed anything suspect during my time at the school.
So pervasive and systemic was the school's covering up of information that eventually the administration faced racketeering charges. Most of the charges ended with settlements in which all court records were sealed and all involved were put under gag orders, but some court documents eventually saw the light of day, revealing familiar moves on the part of administrators: granting dispensations to priests they knew were abusers, moving them around, etc. A psychoterapist who directs a victim survivor's network wrote a comprehensive report on the whole mess and one of the things in his report that's most distressing is news of a "seminar" on clergy abuse at the school in 2002, ten years after the school's own abuse broke and as high-profile cases in Boston and L.A. were first coming to light. At this seminar (which no victims were invited to be part of), according to the report, one of the school's attorneys told students:
Time and again, the pattern in these cases is cover up the abuse, smear the victims, and claim anti-Catholic sentiment and anti-Catholic media are to blame. I've followed the abuse stories very closely in large part because my high school (a seminary boarding school) was at the center of one of the highest profile sex abuse scandals. We even made the cover of Time Magazine. The story broke in December of 1992, just six months after I graduated from the school. I was home from college for the holidays when a friend called and told me to put on CNN. A rather large group of former students brought pedophilia charges against several priests and brothers from the seminary, including a teacher who I had for U.S. History and Sociology and another teacher I had for Algebra 2 and Calculus. I was shocked, never having witnessed anything suspect during my time at the school.
So pervasive and systemic was the school's covering up of information that eventually the administration faced racketeering charges. Most of the charges ended with settlements in which all court records were sealed and all involved were put under gag orders, but some court documents eventually saw the light of day, revealing familiar moves on the part of administrators: granting dispensations to priests they knew were abusers, moving them around, etc. A psychoterapist who directs a victim survivor's network wrote a comprehensive report on the whole mess and one of the things in his report that's most distressing is news of a "seminar" on clergy abuse at the school in 2002, ten years after the school's own abuse broke and as high-profile cases in Boston and L.A. were first coming to light. At this seminar (which no victims were invited to be part of), according to the report, one of the school's attorneys told students:
- "[Clergy abuse] isn’t worthy of being talked about."
- "The media has exaggerated stories about the priests because it hates Catholicism and doesn’t understand us. So they make each story more gigantic than it should be."
- “[The] tiny [number of abusers] said they were sorry and have gone on to live better lives.” While “most people have much to answer for when they face God in the afterlife,” he was “confident every priest would be asked very few questions.”
The hypocrisy is astounding--at my old school in Wisconsin, in Boston, and now in L.A. I can't recommend Deliver Us From Evil highly enough. The film is an opportunity to hear terrible stories that the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has paid astronomical amounts of money and taken extreme measures to squelch.
this and that
In the last two days:
- responded to one-third of my OWP portfolios
- peer-reviewed an article
- wrote letter of rec. for a Who Says? contributor
- brought a boatload of stuff I had taken to Ohio back to my campus office
- registered for this Friday's 'Forum on Community, Culture, and Race,' a symposium happening in conjunction with this weekend's Concert of Colors
- figured out which bands at the Concert of Colors I don't want to miss...Black Bottom Collective and ?&theMysterians are at the top of that list
- worked out
- realized there are a bunch of articles in both the new College English and the new CCC that I need to read
- read a manuscript for my pal Steve Climer
- set up a new blog for my Rhetoric of Civic Engagement research project...bookmark it and watch for posts to begin in the next few days
7/15/2007
re-entry
Nice to get back to real life in the motor city after four weeks in Oxford (Ohio, not the U.K.). As always working with the Ohio Writing Project was a pleasure. I learn so much from the teachers who complete the project and admire their energy and creativity...not to mention the numbers: the number of students they teach every day, the number of hours they're in the classroom every single day. It's permissable and commonplace in many contexts to badmouth the work of public school teachers. The myth of laziness: they get out of work at three (ha!), they only work nine months a year. The myth of ineffectuality: those who can do... I always think of Mike Rose's great book Possible Lives when I meet OWP associates who give so much. Trekking down to Oxford feels kind of like summer camp, complete with walks in Western Woods and life in a dorm room.
It's fun, but can't beat getting back to real life. This weekend, Nicole and I worked at Caribou Coffee, she working on cases and me grading owp final portfolios (which I must mail out this week complete with my comments and feedback). We went to church. We ate at the lazy j ranch...details here at the new and improved lazy j blog. Normal stuff, which feels pretty good.
Much to do. That is, after getting these portfolios done. I teach two classes this fall (thank you, gods of the pre-tenure course releases!); I'm ready to roll in Advanced Exposition (planned that syllabus down in Oxford) but have a new syllabus to prep for the new Writing as Civic Literacy course. (If you're keeping score at home, that means this will be the third semester in eleven years (!) in which I'm not teaching a section of first-year writing.) And I'm planning a classroom research project for the WCL course that involves collecting data on student attitudes toward community and civic life. The proposal is before the UM-Dearborn IRB right now (finished that down in Oxford) but some details of the project still need worked out. And I've got a boatload of research I want to read on the rhetoric of civic engagement and service learning before September hits. I'm probably going to start a companion blog this week to respond to some of that literature, so stay tuned for that.
Anyhoo, I'm glad to be back in Detroit. Hopefully, regular blogging to follow...
It's fun, but can't beat getting back to real life. This weekend, Nicole and I worked at Caribou Coffee, she working on cases and me grading owp final portfolios (which I must mail out this week complete with my comments and feedback). We went to church. We ate at the lazy j ranch...details here at the new and improved lazy j blog. Normal stuff, which feels pretty good.
Much to do. That is, after getting these portfolios done. I teach two classes this fall (thank you, gods of the pre-tenure course releases!); I'm ready to roll in Advanced Exposition (planned that syllabus down in Oxford) but have a new syllabus to prep for the new Writing as Civic Literacy course. (If you're keeping score at home, that means this will be the third semester in eleven years (!) in which I'm not teaching a section of first-year writing.) And I'm planning a classroom research project for the WCL course that involves collecting data on student attitudes toward community and civic life. The proposal is before the UM-Dearborn IRB right now (finished that down in Oxford) but some details of the project still need worked out. And I've got a boatload of research I want to read on the rhetoric of civic engagement and service learning before September hits. I'm probably going to start a companion blog this week to respond to some of that literature, so stay tuned for that.
Anyhoo, I'm glad to be back in Detroit. Hopefully, regular blogging to follow...
7/11/2007
rediscovery
Last week I found a copy of Chipmunk Punk on vinyl at the Brass Armadillo Flea Market, one of my favorite record-hunting spots in Ohio.
I had this record when I was seven and must have spun it a thousand times. The title may seem like a stretch, in part due to the selection of songs that Alvin, Simon, and Theodore tackle. "Refugee" by Tom Petty and "You May Be Right" by Billy Joel stand out as two of the particularly questionable choices. You won't find any Ramones or Dead Boys covers on the record, but, out of fairness, a Blondie song--albeit disco-era Blondie--appears ("Call Me"). The Chipmunks perform three songs by The Knack and the suggestiveness of all three is a bit creepy in the whole cartoon context of the songs. But as a whole the album really works, especially the opening track, "Let's Go" by the Cars, where the synth but simple sound of the song meshes well with the high-pitched voices of the 'Munks.
Elementary school strikes me as the most punk thing in the world. Hence my new favorites the Muldoons capture the primal, unadorned possibilities of rock and roll better than any other band in Detroit right now. And like the Muldoons, the tracks on Chipmunk Punk sound like a playground. Not rope jumping, so much. More like a game of dodgeball or keep-a-way. Aggression, sweat, skinned knees. And most of all the alienation subtext each of those games represents. Chipmunk Punk recognizes the barely there line between rage and the melancholy of exclusion. The record walks that barely there line. Punk rock understands that somebody screaming might be the most senstive person in the world.
7/09/2007
Paint Valley Jamboree
"Family Oriented, Concession Stand, Alcohol Free, Smoke Free, Drug Free"
Live from Bainbridge, Ohio, it's Saturday night. So the show--whose motto might be the phrase above which comes from the jamboree's website--starts at 7:00 and long before the curtain's up, the place already feels like a time capsule. The building looks like a Grange Hall with tattered, theatre-style seats. In the lobby, pies in plastic wrap sell for six dollars and big sacks of popcorn for fifty cents. The seats fill with senior citizens as well as a few families and, oddly, four high school kids. Mostly folks from Bainbridge and surrounding villages in the crowd, but I've traveled from Oxford, two hours west of here, with my visiting parents.
Bainbridge sits in the middle of southern Ohio, hours east of Cinci, hours south of Columbus, a good ways north of the river. The town is home to the Paint Valley Jamboree. Nine dollars gets you three hours of entertainment. Curtain goes up at seven and the show is kind of like what I imagine the Carter Family's traveling show was like in the 1930s. At Paint Valley, a house band provides back-up all night and a series of singers (mostly singer-guitarists actually) takes the mic one-by-one and performs two songs each. First, the house band. Steel guitar, bass and drums, a multi-instrumenalist who mostly does piano duties, a fiddler, and an electric guitar player who might be well into his 80s. Just unbelievable musicianship.
Most of the singers are older guys, though a few women of various ages take their turns too. Some old-time gospel. A little rockabilly (the band's mostly electric) and a little bluegrass. A LOT of old country standards. Mostly the kind of songs that have been in the public domain for generations. It's like a punk rock show in that the band races through song after song after song and not a one goes on for more than three minutes, tops. One of the high school kids gets up and heads backstage. I figure she's probably one of the band member's grandkids but she walks out onto the stage and belts out a few numbers, including "Stand By Your Man" (certainly the only song performed that was written in my parents' lifetimes).
One singer--one of the older gentlemen--refers to being eight months cancer-free. The emcee joshes afterward that he thought the guy was going to say he was eight months pregnant, and then immediately apologizes for using a word that would have gotten him slapped by his mama when he was growing up. One of the singers immediately exits the backstage area after her set and tells my dad there's a hot dog with her name on it back at the concession stand. During intermission (a quick affair during which fifty-fifty raffle tickets are sold), the emcee reminds everyone that the concession stand offers "miracle salve" (good for "new hips, joint trouble, and the carpal tunnel").
After intermission, the same line-up. This time, one song only. Not a sour note all night. Not a single weak or even average musician in the house band. Not a bad song all night. I know I'm going back before the end of this summer. It makes the most sense to go there while I'm in Oxford for the Writing Project, but it's well worth the drive from Detroit (and farther). If you saw Walk the Line and thought about how cool it would have been to see those tours with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, miscelaneous Carters, etc., then get you to Bainbridge.
Live from Bainbridge, Ohio, it's Saturday night. So the show--whose motto might be the phrase above which comes from the jamboree's website--starts at 7:00 and long before the curtain's up, the place already feels like a time capsule. The building looks like a Grange Hall with tattered, theatre-style seats. In the lobby, pies in plastic wrap sell for six dollars and big sacks of popcorn for fifty cents. The seats fill with senior citizens as well as a few families and, oddly, four high school kids. Mostly folks from Bainbridge and surrounding villages in the crowd, but I've traveled from Oxford, two hours west of here, with my visiting parents.
Bainbridge sits in the middle of southern Ohio, hours east of Cinci, hours south of Columbus, a good ways north of the river. The town is home to the Paint Valley Jamboree. Nine dollars gets you three hours of entertainment. Curtain goes up at seven and the show is kind of like what I imagine the Carter Family's traveling show was like in the 1930s. At Paint Valley, a house band provides back-up all night and a series of singers (mostly singer-guitarists actually) takes the mic one-by-one and performs two songs each. First, the house band. Steel guitar, bass and drums, a multi-instrumenalist who mostly does piano duties, a fiddler, and an electric guitar player who might be well into his 80s. Just unbelievable musicianship.
Most of the singers are older guys, though a few women of various ages take their turns too. Some old-time gospel. A little rockabilly (the band's mostly electric) and a little bluegrass. A LOT of old country standards. Mostly the kind of songs that have been in the public domain for generations. It's like a punk rock show in that the band races through song after song after song and not a one goes on for more than three minutes, tops. One of the high school kids gets up and heads backstage. I figure she's probably one of the band member's grandkids but she walks out onto the stage and belts out a few numbers, including "Stand By Your Man" (certainly the only song performed that was written in my parents' lifetimes).
One singer--one of the older gentlemen--refers to being eight months cancer-free. The emcee joshes afterward that he thought the guy was going to say he was eight months pregnant, and then immediately apologizes for using a word that would have gotten him slapped by his mama when he was growing up. One of the singers immediately exits the backstage area after her set and tells my dad there's a hot dog with her name on it back at the concession stand. During intermission (a quick affair during which fifty-fifty raffle tickets are sold), the emcee reminds everyone that the concession stand offers "miracle salve" (good for "new hips, joint trouble, and the carpal tunnel").
After intermission, the same line-up. This time, one song only. Not a sour note all night. Not a single weak or even average musician in the house band. Not a bad song all night. I know I'm going back before the end of this summer. It makes the most sense to go there while I'm in Oxford for the Writing Project, but it's well worth the drive from Detroit (and farther). If you saw Walk the Line and thought about how cool it would have been to see those tours with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, miscelaneous Carters, etc., then get you to Bainbridge.
7/04/2007
fourth of july
Growing up, I don't recall doing many patriotic things. Actually I can't recall doing *any* patriotic things. We didn't have a flag. We didn't sing patriotic songs or say the Pledge of Allegiance. And when we had picnics on the 4th of July, the food tended to be ethnic: zucchini-parmesan bake, pasta salad (the kind with olive oil, not mayo!), sausage sandwiches, fried hot peppers. I recall that my grandfather had a flag at his house that he would raise on nice mornings and then take down in the evenings. He was a veteran of World War II and I remember figuring that most vets probably had flags but normal civilians didn't. I have no idea whether this experience was an anomaly or not for kids growing up in the 70s and 80s, a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate world.
The greatest memory I have of Independence Day was 1985. I was eleven. My parents, sister, and I went to see a matinee of "Back to the Future," that all-time classic summer "event movie." We never went to the movies and I bet my mom and dad can count on one hand the number of movies they've seen at a theater since July 4, 1985. My dad took me to see "Stand by Me" a year or two later, mainly because I was obsessed with Stephen King books at the time and positively elated at the thought of seeing an adaptation of his work at the movies. But going to the movies as a family? That never happened.
We all loved the film. A Huey Lewis theme song? The kid who played Alex P. Keaton on the bigscreen? What's not to love. I remember kind of identifying with the storyline, too, and reading myself into the plotline as kids (and adults) tend to do. My parents, like the McFlys, were high school sweethearts in the 50s. I was always kind of fascinated about whether their lives matched pop culture representations of their generation, though for some reason I never really asked them. Did you go to sock hops and drink malts? Did your teachers think rock and roll was evil? I think I got my answers to these questions from Back to the Future and took some kind of comfort from the answers that the film provided. Yes, your parents got into trouble too. Yes, your parents were awkward too. Maybe that's why this is my greatest 4th of July memory. Maybe it's got less to do with how cool and rare and fun it was to go the movies with my mom and dad and more to do with what I learned about them from both the fictional world on the screen and the imagination in my head.
The greatest memory I have of Independence Day was 1985. I was eleven. My parents, sister, and I went to see a matinee of "Back to the Future," that all-time classic summer "event movie." We never went to the movies and I bet my mom and dad can count on one hand the number of movies they've seen at a theater since July 4, 1985. My dad took me to see "Stand by Me" a year or two later, mainly because I was obsessed with Stephen King books at the time and positively elated at the thought of seeing an adaptation of his work at the movies. But going to the movies as a family? That never happened.
We all loved the film. A Huey Lewis theme song? The kid who played Alex P. Keaton on the bigscreen? What's not to love. I remember kind of identifying with the storyline, too, and reading myself into the plotline as kids (and adults) tend to do. My parents, like the McFlys, were high school sweethearts in the 50s. I was always kind of fascinated about whether their lives matched pop culture representations of their generation, though for some reason I never really asked them. Did you go to sock hops and drink malts? Did your teachers think rock and roll was evil? I think I got my answers to these questions from Back to the Future and took some kind of comfort from the answers that the film provided. Yes, your parents got into trouble too. Yes, your parents were awkward too. Maybe that's why this is my greatest 4th of July memory. Maybe it's got less to do with how cool and rare and fun it was to go the movies with my mom and dad and more to do with what I learned about them from both the fictional world on the screen and the imagination in my head.
6/28/2007
quite a line-up
Larry seems to have accomplished what Lorne Michaels couldn't. Also, I like that Michael Moore's the headliner.
6/26/2007
klosterman
I've written before of my appreciation for rock critic Chuck Klosterman's often deadpan, usually hilarious, voice. Here's a taste:
I can't resist. Here's Klosterman riffing on the popularity of the Pirates of the Caribbean:
Led Zeppelin's fourth studio album--1971's unnamed Zoso (so called for the enigmatic symbols on its cover)--is the most famous hard-rock album ever recorded, not to mention a watershed moment for every grizzled old man who's ever carried a bundle of sticks.Now I can't read that sentence without laughing. I'm putting together the syllabus for my Advanced Exposition class in the fall and one of the assignments is a Pop Culture Narrative paper that asks students to engage with a movie, music video, CD, or similar text that has provided them pleasure or perhaps even become an obsession. Klosterman's great at that particular rhetorical move, writing in a style that's all his about what floats his boat (Kiss, The Real World, the 1980s Celtics-Lakers rivalry, The Wonder Years) and why (his "why" usually involves elaborate theories about what it means for culture to be "overt" and "advanced" followed by admissions that he finds these things pleasurable). As examples of the kind of thinking/writing I want them to do, I'm asking students to read a few pieces by Klosterman, including his track-by-track take on the personal and public significance of Zoso. Also, Sarah Vowell's similarly stimulating piece on her obsession with The Godfather ("Take the Canoli") during her undergrad years. I plan to write alongside students and complete all the assignments. Maybe I'll tackle my obsession with 'Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip' or 'Freaks and Geeks' or the X-Ray Spex's only record.
I can't resist. Here's Klosterman riffing on the popularity of the Pirates of the Caribbean:
Super Bowl XXXVII [was] the first all-pirate championship of the modern era. As you may recall, the Buccaneers defeated the Raiders. This prompted a very thin, moderately intoxicated Londoner named Nona to ask me a question: "Does every American football team have a pirate-oriented nickname?"Klosterman drops allusions like Dennis Miller, though Chuck skews hipster. Like Dave Barry, Klosterman's funniest moments are tossed-off asides only tangentially connected to his subject matter. And his closest kins, of course, are NPR-types like David Sedaris, the aforementioned Vowell, and Julia Sweeney. His rhetoric and his humor have little in common with most rock critics of the present and past, as Klosterman refuses to idolize the individual rockstar, instead idolizing his own personal relationship with that star's art.
writing project
For the fourth summer in a row, I'm co-teaching the four-week writing workshop that forms the core of the Ohio Writing Project. This is the second summer I've return from Detroit to southwestern Ohio and Miami University in order to continue my involvement with OWP. Why do it? Working with the writing project is like no other teaching experience. A room full of enthusiastic language arts and writing teachers, all teaching one another. Kindergarten, all the way up to 12th grade, all points in between. The entire day is interactive: teaching presentations and demos, visiting writers, extended writing periods, open mic lunches. I always walk away with ideas.
I always walk away feeling more like a writer then I have in months. Despite the intense contact time (five days a week, six-and-a-half hours a day), I always find lots of my own writing time, too. Last year, I drafted a short story, a whole article that found its way into Teaching English in the Two-Year College last month, a half dozen decent poems, and several writing assignments. This year, I'm working on an IRB proposal for the civic engagement research I'll be conducting this coming academic year and another short story--plus, reading a bunch of work (Jeff Grabill's book, Paula Matthieu's book, various Campus Compact documents, some great articles by Nedra Reynolds) that I'll draw on in the new research project.
Worth spending four weeks away from the motor city? You bet.
I always walk away feeling more like a writer then I have in months. Despite the intense contact time (five days a week, six-and-a-half hours a day), I always find lots of my own writing time, too. Last year, I drafted a short story, a whole article that found its way into Teaching English in the Two-Year College last month, a half dozen decent poems, and several writing assignments. This year, I'm working on an IRB proposal for the civic engagement research I'll be conducting this coming academic year and another short story--plus, reading a bunch of work (Jeff Grabill's book, Paula Matthieu's book, various Campus Compact documents, some great articles by Nedra Reynolds) that I'll draw on in the new research project.
Worth spending four weeks away from the motor city? You bet.
6/20/2007
inspired by Wislawa Szymborska
Today at the Writing Project we read Szymborska's "Possibilities," a hopeful poem of preferences. Each line begins with the refrain "I prefer..." and the piece becomes a litany of the narrator's (imagined? idealized?) world. Quite nice. I wrote my own version:
I prefer punk rock music.
I prefer novels by Elmore Leonard, Roddy Doyle, and Joyce Carol Oates.
I prefer Canada and the Harvey's Burgers you can get there.
I prefer playing cards with Nicole when we both should be working.
I prefer good teaching days when students have energy and wow me with words at least once.
I prefer talkative students to those who stay passive and quiet, though I was quiet when I sat in their desks.
I prefer acceptance letters from academic journals instead of rejections that can ruin a day or week or more.
I prefer young bands from Detroit who play grimy music in grimy bars in the shadows of dead auto plants.
I prefer preachers who preach justice to preachers who preach rules.
I prefer peace to war.
I prefer brown bag lectures on campus and visiting writers.
I prefer Tues/Thurs teaching to a 9-to-5 lifestyle.
I prefer office hours to department meetings.
I prefer Arabic or Thai over a steakhouse.
I prefer memories of college over memories of high school.
I prefer a large coffee with two packets of Splenda.
I prefer Saturdays spent cooking.
I prefer walking in Western Woods when I'm in Oxford but not the allergies that follow.
Szymborska's poem reminds me of the 100-Things Meme that many post on their blogs as a kind of a revelatory, list-oriented, personal instroduction. Poetry and blogging are similar in so many ways: their (sometime) indulgence, their focus on "documentary" writing, their reporting of the familiar/the unfamiliar/the mundane/the extraordinary, their playfulness.
I prefer punk rock music.
I prefer novels by Elmore Leonard, Roddy Doyle, and Joyce Carol Oates.
I prefer Canada and the Harvey's Burgers you can get there.
I prefer playing cards with Nicole when we both should be working.
I prefer good teaching days when students have energy and wow me with words at least once.
I prefer talkative students to those who stay passive and quiet, though I was quiet when I sat in their desks.
I prefer acceptance letters from academic journals instead of rejections that can ruin a day or week or more.
I prefer young bands from Detroit who play grimy music in grimy bars in the shadows of dead auto plants.
I prefer preachers who preach justice to preachers who preach rules.
I prefer peace to war.
I prefer brown bag lectures on campus and visiting writers.
I prefer Tues/Thurs teaching to a 9-to-5 lifestyle.
I prefer office hours to department meetings.
I prefer Arabic or Thai over a steakhouse.
I prefer memories of college over memories of high school.
I prefer a large coffee with two packets of Splenda.
I prefer Saturdays spent cooking.
I prefer walking in Western Woods when I'm in Oxford but not the allergies that follow.
Szymborska's poem reminds me of the 100-Things Meme that many post on their blogs as a kind of a revelatory, list-oriented, personal instroduction. Poetry and blogging are similar in so many ways: their (sometime) indulgence, their focus on "documentary" writing, their reporting of the familiar/the unfamiliar/the mundane/the extraordinary, their playfulness.
6/18/2007
race, gender, and academe
My friend Ray Mazurek mentioned last week that during his ten-year tenure as an undergraduate and then graduate college student, he only had three female professors and four professors of color. This was in the 70s.
I also spent exactly ten years in college, from 1992 until 2002. So I decided to do a count of my own. Nearly half of my professors were women. Okay, interesting, especially given how different my numbers are compared to Ray's. Then, I broke it down by race. During my ten years as a full-time college student, I had TWO professors of color. And this was mostly in the 90s. And I did my undergraduate work in Detroit, and got my doctorate thirty miles north of the Mexican border. And both classes were in multiculturalism (an African-American woman taught my Af-Am Lit class and a Latino man taught my multi-cultural education seminar)--non-required electives that I sought out.
I also spent exactly ten years in college, from 1992 until 2002. So I decided to do a count of my own. Nearly half of my professors were women. Okay, interesting, especially given how different my numbers are compared to Ray's. Then, I broke it down by race. During my ten years as a full-time college student, I had TWO professors of color. And this was mostly in the 90s. And I did my undergraduate work in Detroit, and got my doctorate thirty miles north of the Mexican border. And both classes were in multiculturalism (an African-American woman taught my Af-Am Lit class and a Latino man taught my multi-cultural education seminar)--non-required electives that I sought out.
6/16/2007
WCSA Conference, Day Three
Early morning session on "Class in the Classroom: Teaching Strategies." Tess Evans and Jacqueline Preston, in "Discourse Community as a Foundation for Teaching Research and Writing," gave an overview of the concept of a discourse community (a group that shares common goals or values and, by extension, a common vocabulary and set of language practices), geared--appopriately for a multi-disciplinary conference like this one--for an audience of folks from various disciplines. They also spoke about the imperative to challenge the vague "default audience" of academic writing and spoke of a writing pedagogy involving the development of rhetorical awareness, the exploration of various alternative rhetorics (that is, alternative to academic apporaches), and the completion of a writing project that uses the conventions of a discourse community of the student's choosing. Jan Schmittauer and Sue Lape spoke about the need to sequence writing assignments in their talk "Resisting Tradition, Inviting Experience." Again, familiar territory for compositionists but geared toward a broader audience of conference-goers. They used the literature courses at their community colleges as examples of venues in which to invite low-stakes, experience-based responses to a series of writing prompts, leading to tasks that get more and more challenging. By the end of an assignment sequence, they suggest, students have a "coherent whole." This is especially important, say Schmittauer and Lape, for first-generation college students and others trying to make sense of the expectations of literate, academic tasks. Lastly, Ray Mazurek gave his paper "Teaching the Problem of Whiteness," a report on how Ted Allen (The Invention of the White Race)'s work on race in the seventeenth century has influenced his approach to teaching the first-semester American Studies survey on his campus. The concept of "whiteness" grew up during that century, Mazurek suggests, to "create a buffer between the elite and the masses." Mazurek's talk made me want to look up Allen's work and learn more. He glossed Allen's argument so quickly that I didn't make out its nuances.
The mid-day plenary was dedicated to the memory of Tillie Olsen. Few dry eyes in the auditorium as conference-goers remembered the great writer who has been an icon among the working-class studies community since the conference started up in the mid-90s at Youngstown State. We screened the new documentary "A Heart in Action," which I hope sees wider release, as it captures Tillie visiting various classrooms and marching in various public actions--two activities that she loved. Julie Olsen Edwards (Tillie's daughter) shared stories, choking back tears. She said that, growing up without much money, her mom would always fill a paper bag with books from used bookstores, each one chosen carefully. She also reminisced about the MLA session where Tillie told a panelist speaking about education and privelege to be careful not to frame education as anything but a birthright. To bring some levity, she also talked about Tillie getting kicked out of the PTA because they thought she was a spy from the Kremlin. Barb Jensen and Cherie Rankin read excerpts from "I Stand Here Ironing" and Yonnondio respectively. Steve Zeltzer spoke about Tillie's eternal optimism, noting, "If you're going to be a revolutionary in this country, you've got to have patience." Sherry Linkon, past president of the Working-Class Studies Association, acknowledged that Tillie was one of the key inspirations for starting the new working-class studies movement and recalled her passing around the guitar at the Pub at YSU, suggesting that the image of someone so renowned hanging out with conference-goers captured the essence of what the field and the conference are all about. Janet Zandy ended the session by reading a short piece "Walking with Tillie" about her various encounters and conversations with the writer.
All that, plus a great banquet, more great poets in the evening, and the singing of many labor songs. You just don't get that at most academic conferences! Tomorrow, back to Detroit, so I should get some sleep.
The mid-day plenary was dedicated to the memory of Tillie Olsen. Few dry eyes in the auditorium as conference-goers remembered the great writer who has been an icon among the working-class studies community since the conference started up in the mid-90s at Youngstown State. We screened the new documentary "A Heart in Action," which I hope sees wider release, as it captures Tillie visiting various classrooms and marching in various public actions--two activities that she loved. Julie Olsen Edwards (Tillie's daughter) shared stories, choking back tears. She said that, growing up without much money, her mom would always fill a paper bag with books from used bookstores, each one chosen carefully. She also reminisced about the MLA session where Tillie told a panelist speaking about education and privelege to be careful not to frame education as anything but a birthright. To bring some levity, she also talked about Tillie getting kicked out of the PTA because they thought she was a spy from the Kremlin. Barb Jensen and Cherie Rankin read excerpts from "I Stand Here Ironing" and Yonnondio respectively. Steve Zeltzer spoke about Tillie's eternal optimism, noting, "If you're going to be a revolutionary in this country, you've got to have patience." Sherry Linkon, past president of the Working-Class Studies Association, acknowledged that Tillie was one of the key inspirations for starting the new working-class studies movement and recalled her passing around the guitar at the Pub at YSU, suggesting that the image of someone so renowned hanging out with conference-goers captured the essence of what the field and the conference are all about. Janet Zandy ended the session by reading a short piece "Walking with Tillie" about her various encounters and conversations with the writer.
All that, plus a great banquet, more great poets in the evening, and the singing of many labor songs. You just don't get that at most academic conferences! Tomorrow, back to Detroit, so I should get some sleep.
6/14/2007
Working-Class Studies Association Conference
A full day of conference activity, and I do mean FULL DAY. In the a.m. Paul Schadewald from Macalaster's Office of Civic Engagement led a tour of selected neighborhoods of Minneapolis and St. Paul, in part doing a show-and-tell of some of the key community agencies that "Mac" partners with in its service learning courses, in part taking us to some cool public art installations including a mural in one of the Latino areas depicting various icons (Rigoberta Menchu and Diego Rivera among others). A quick anecdote from the tour: Looking out over the Mississippi from the upper flats of St. Paul's westside, Schadewald pointed out several visible churches and made reference to an Irish-Catholic parish that had served some of the Latino community before the construction of a Latino parish. Racism at the Irish parish, he said, was among the factors that led some Latinos to start their own church. A middle-aged couple happened to be walking by and stopped to challenge Schadewald, the man--visibly bothered--saying his parents had attended the Irish church and had worked with various community groups to assist the new Latino community. His wife calmed the man down and then pressed a flustered Schadewald for some examples of racism at the church.
I don't point this out to criticize our tour guide, who was full of information about the twin cities, but rather to suggest that the exchange illustrates a difficulty and ethical dilemma inherent in articulating community critiques to actual community members. Here was a guy who grew up at this church, out for a walk with his wife, who happens to overhear someone who seems to be calling his home community racist. Our guide, full of knowledge and well-versed in identity politics, was at a loss for a way to talk to this particular community member. The CWCS Association is full of not only academics, but also community organizers, labor leaders, artists, and cultural workers of various ilk...so this wasn't a case of out-of-touch academics who can only communicate with other academics. This was something more complex about how we engage with physical spaces like cities and neighborhoods and communities.
The afternoon plenary session, "Working-Class Culture and Counter-Culture," attracted a large audience. Psychologist David Greene spoke about class as a "matrix of identity," a set of markers (little sense of entitlement, economic insecurity, minimization of the self, etc.) that inevitably fold in contradictory markers, some of which empower (male), and some of which disempower (gay). These paradoxes are disconcerting, Greene said, and lead many to fall into the dominant culture trap of "aspiring upward and denigrating downward."
The labor historian David Roediger served as a respondent of sorts to Greene's emphasis on class as culture. Roediger said the move toward humanistic approaches to class has caused the scholarly community to overlook a great deal of misery and called on the audience to foreground the question 'What is it that keeps workers from dreaming?' as we thought about class this week at the conference. One of the ways that Roediger answered that question was with the phrase "organized religion," and I thought back to the exchange in St. Paul earlier that day. Cool vocabulary word I learned during his talk: "homers," which refer to items that line workers steal and/or build for the express purpose of stealing. Notable example of this phenomenon from pop culture: the car parts that Johnny Cash's narrator swipes in "One Piece at a Time."
Batting clean-up at the plenary, Betsy Leondar-Wright, who gave a helpful review of Bernstein's elaborated vs. restricted code in order to talk about the possibilities of coalitions across class divides. In her work with various activist groups, Leondar-Wright said she's observed working-class organizations tending toward the indirect and the implicit while professional-managerial class organizations tend to spell things out explicitly. When faced with conflict, members of the w/c group might make a joke or go grab a drink, whereas the pm/c group is more likely to "get meta." This trend presents challenges to movements whose memberships are diverse in terms of class make-up, especially when pm/c leaders "impose inessential weirdness," or make moves that tend to turn off many w/c movement participants. She classified members of cross-class social movements as "traditionalists" and "rebels" and said that when groups consist of w/c traditionalists and pm/c traditionalists, things are usually cool. Likewise, when groups consist of w/c rebels and pm/c rebels, groups find commonalities. But when social movements consist of traditionalists (moderates, etc.) from one class and rebels (radicals, etc.) from another class, that's when significant conflict happens. The mixture of w/c traditionalists and pm/c rebels is particularly volatile.
Okay, enough play-by-play. I saw some screenings of works-in-progress including Jim Catano (who contributed to my book on working-class rhetorics)'s film about the attempt in Homestead, PA, to replace steel with heritage tourism as a community anchor. At the same session, Rosemary Feurer showed her new Mother Jones documentary. Very cool. In the evening, a night of poetry and fiction. Detroit's own Lolita Hernandez read from her Cadillac book. And a great poet from here in the twin cities, Bao Phi, read his work about Vietnamese-American identity, including an insanely good piece about Hurricane Katrina.
Hopefully, more updates tomorrow. I'm giving my paper tomorrow afternoon and need to go practice before hitting the sheets.
I don't point this out to criticize our tour guide, who was full of information about the twin cities, but rather to suggest that the exchange illustrates a difficulty and ethical dilemma inherent in articulating community critiques to actual community members. Here was a guy who grew up at this church, out for a walk with his wife, who happens to overhear someone who seems to be calling his home community racist. Our guide, full of knowledge and well-versed in identity politics, was at a loss for a way to talk to this particular community member. The CWCS Association is full of not only academics, but also community organizers, labor leaders, artists, and cultural workers of various ilk...so this wasn't a case of out-of-touch academics who can only communicate with other academics. This was something more complex about how we engage with physical spaces like cities and neighborhoods and communities.
The afternoon plenary session, "Working-Class Culture and Counter-Culture," attracted a large audience. Psychologist David Greene spoke about class as a "matrix of identity," a set of markers (little sense of entitlement, economic insecurity, minimization of the self, etc.) that inevitably fold in contradictory markers, some of which empower (male), and some of which disempower (gay). These paradoxes are disconcerting, Greene said, and lead many to fall into the dominant culture trap of "aspiring upward and denigrating downward."
The labor historian David Roediger served as a respondent of sorts to Greene's emphasis on class as culture. Roediger said the move toward humanistic approaches to class has caused the scholarly community to overlook a great deal of misery and called on the audience to foreground the question 'What is it that keeps workers from dreaming?' as we thought about class this week at the conference. One of the ways that Roediger answered that question was with the phrase "organized religion," and I thought back to the exchange in St. Paul earlier that day. Cool vocabulary word I learned during his talk: "homers," which refer to items that line workers steal and/or build for the express purpose of stealing. Notable example of this phenomenon from pop culture: the car parts that Johnny Cash's narrator swipes in "One Piece at a Time."
Batting clean-up at the plenary, Betsy Leondar-Wright, who gave a helpful review of Bernstein's elaborated vs. restricted code in order to talk about the possibilities of coalitions across class divides. In her work with various activist groups, Leondar-Wright said she's observed working-class organizations tending toward the indirect and the implicit while professional-managerial class organizations tend to spell things out explicitly. When faced with conflict, members of the w/c group might make a joke or go grab a drink, whereas the pm/c group is more likely to "get meta." This trend presents challenges to movements whose memberships are diverse in terms of class make-up, especially when pm/c leaders "impose inessential weirdness," or make moves that tend to turn off many w/c movement participants. She classified members of cross-class social movements as "traditionalists" and "rebels" and said that when groups consist of w/c traditionalists and pm/c traditionalists, things are usually cool. Likewise, when groups consist of w/c rebels and pm/c rebels, groups find commonalities. But when social movements consist of traditionalists (moderates, etc.) from one class and rebels (radicals, etc.) from another class, that's when significant conflict happens. The mixture of w/c traditionalists and pm/c rebels is particularly volatile.
Okay, enough play-by-play. I saw some screenings of works-in-progress including Jim Catano (who contributed to my book on working-class rhetorics)'s film about the attempt in Homestead, PA, to replace steel with heritage tourism as a community anchor. At the same session, Rosemary Feurer showed her new Mother Jones documentary. Very cool. In the evening, a night of poetry and fiction. Detroit's own Lolita Hernandez read from her Cadillac book. And a great poet from here in the twin cities, Bao Phi, read his work about Vietnamese-American identity, including an insanely good piece about Hurricane Katrina.
Hopefully, more updates tomorrow. I'm giving my paper tomorrow afternoon and need to go practice before hitting the sheets.
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