Results tagged “rhetoric” from Collin vs. Blog

Debbie has an important post up about the latest issue of CCC, which "amputates" the Re/Visions feature on KB in that issue by publishing snatches of it in the journal and the complete versions online.

If there's one thing to take away from this, it's that the journal has problems, ones that aren't going away any time soon. Anyhow, here's the post length comment that I left there:

I almost blogged about this at the time, but elected not to, given that I was hazy on the confidentiality of the conversations. Although I had no role at all in the decision-making process, I was involved in some of the discussions with Deb about how to handle this problem.

The problem isn't just the ridiculously low acceptance rate--it's that rate combined with the fact that the journal has a colossal backlog right now of accepted essays. Traditionally, the answer to the latter problem has been to lower the acceptance rate--accept fewer essays, and the backlog lifts eventually. But Deb's right, I think, to note that that's not a viable solution. The acceptance rate can't honestly go much lower, and even if it could, the editor would have to start rejecting submissions that had been accepted by the readers.

The problem is one I harp on all the time, and that's scale. Our discipline is much larger than it was 10 or 20 years now, and the size of the journal hasn't accommodated the large influx of TT faculty who would like to publish work in what is arguably the flagship journal. And the problem, in my mind, is only exacerbated by a decision-making and election process that pays no attention to professional qualification. Without putting too fine a point on it, there is no guarantee that, in any given year, the people making decisions about the journal have any editorial experience.

There are several solutions that any of us might imagine for this problem, from publishing an extra issue, to temporarily adding pages, to moving to a hybrid of print and POD, etc. I can guarantee that these were all ideas that I suggested, but I don't know how many of them factored into the actual decision. I also talked with Deb about the option that they eventually chose, although my suggestion was to move review essays online, since they're less often the object of the kind of page citation that Nels raises.

So while I'm sad that this happened to you, and wouldn't have been happy had it happened to my R/V set, I also think that there's a larger problem with the journal that needs to be solved. And so I'm also sympathetic with Deb, who's had to struggle with this for some time now. There are several contributing factors--the acceptance rate, the backlog, the growth of our field and subsequent increase in the number of submissions, the obvious and warranted interest in features like Re/Visions, the fact that the average length of a CCC essay has steadily climbed over the last 20 years, the desire to keep the page count consistent, the desire to keep the price of the journal low and accessible, and so on. It's a huge problem that has very material consequences for all of us, and yet, we don't really have the organizational means to deal with it well.

Sigh. So I'm sorry, not in the it's-my-fault way, but in the damn-that-sucks way.

***

Soapboxy enough? If D's post accomplishes one thing, I hope that it sparks some sort of open and frank discussion, beyond the walls of the EC meeting, of the role that the journal plays and should be playing in our field. And how the journal might adapt to a changing economy of scale that is obvious to anyone who cares to look.

We'll see.

So here's a question.

I'm working up my syllabus for a course I'm teaching this fall, a doctoral seminar on Computers and Writing. I've got tons of notes on it, but I'm struggling a little bit with exactly how I want to (a) organize it, and (b) reduce the readings to a manageable set. Later today, I'll probably toss up a page that offers up my progress-to-date, but in the meantime, I thought I'd ask for a little collective wisdom. Here are my constraints:

The course is going to be 1/3 workshop, 2/3 seminar. That is, each week, we're spending at least an hour in our lab, where I'll be running a series of hands-on intros to a broad range of tools and platforms. The goal will be familiarity rather than mastery, of course, but I'm a big believer in the doing alongside the thinking.

One corollary of this is that I will be asking the students to work outside of class on their technology skills, and so I'll be requiring a little less reading than I normally might for a seminar. I'm pretty much decided that I'm not ordering books--my plans are to go with 3-4 chapters/articles per week.

And of course, the problem here is that a given week's topic could pretty much be the theme for an entire course, so I need to really distill rather than overwhelm. At the same time, I've got shelves and shelves of stuff I could use, not to mention all the stuff online. I'm still debating internally about whether it's best to shoot for a rough chronology of C&W or to focus on more recent developments for the most part.

Nothing to it but to do it, I suppose. Look for updates later today. Oh, and the collective wisdom part is this: what texts, perspectives, ideas do y'all think are indispensable for a course on C&W, one that's likely to be the only sustained exposure to the sub-d that these students will experience?

What, content?!

Yes, it's true. For a variety of reasons, my blog has been deep in summer slumber. But chatting with Derek about Karen Kopelson's recent piece in CCC, and the carnival thereupon, has functioned as the sharp stick, at least for the moment. Whether I'll ramp up the sleeping bear fully before the school year is still an open question.

I have a number of approaches to take to Kopelson's article, including a host of methodological concerns that seem to be the first line of inquiry I take with most of my academic reading nowadays. But I'm going to set them mostly aside for the time being; like Clancy, I'm happy to see the question of pedagogical imperative raised in explicit ways. Also, when Clancy writes, "It's not that I don't enjoy teaching or don't think it's important, but I came to the field another way," there's a healthy portion of that statement that applies to me as well. Where I differ, I suppose, is in that the teaching that I do that I find most fulfilling occurs in other places than the first-year composition classroom, and that's perhaps why I resent the "imperative" as much as I do at times. I think (and have said on occasion) that there are considerable problems in our field when it comes to graduate education. I think that, as students, instructors, colleagues, and professionals, we have allowed graduate instruction to remain mired in a model of education that plods happily along as though process never happened in our discipline. So, if you ask me, I'm still waiting for some of this so-called pedagogical imperative to take hold.

Now, that being said, I would raise one methodological complaint. And I raise it fully aware that it would be problematic in the context of Kopelson's article. There is indeed some value to knowing the extent to which lore about the dread "pedagogy chapter" circulates among graduate students and faculty. Potentially more valuable, it seems to me, and eminently possible, would be to match up these accounts against the dissertations actually generated both by the students of a given program, and those directed by the faculty who responded. Because honestly, the test of this imperative is less a matter of whether it circulates informally (because of course it does) and more a matter of whether or not it plays out across the dissertations in the field. Okay, that's all I'll say about method for the moment.

The other issue I want to raise, though, returns to the question of graduate education and the mentorship involved in any pedagogical interaction between writer and reader/director. One of the things that I learned early on, when I was muddling through my early years as an FYC instructor, was that "suggestions" coming from the instructor were very rarely interpreted as such. I learned instead to try and offer multiple choices in my feedback. Even now, I'm only sometimes better at it than others. But I like to think that it also helped me grow as a writer, someone able to take suggestions as such, think them through, and act on them as I see fit. What I'm getting at here, unfortunately, is that I think many of us forget this lesson when we enter the dissertation process. (And this is only one of the many things we forget, I'm afraid.) So it's not surprising to me that faculty might see the "pedagogical imperative" as more heuristic while their students perceive it as gospel. I've seen this pattern play out in all sorts of venues, with all sorts of students, in any number of contexts.

And this is not a matter of blaming the students, either. In many important ways, the dissertation should be about the coming-to-colleaguehood of graduate students, and to be sure, there are some faculty better at it than others. But it's a question with two answers--there are some faculty who will always make you feel like their student, and there are some students who will always treat you as faculty, even after a body's received the doctorate. Ideally, though, the dissertation is that final step into the profession as colleague instead of student, and the burden of that step is borne by everyone involved in the process. Or should be. From the students' perspective, this means an unfamiliar transition, one where they must learn to listen to faculty as colleagues rather than faculty. From the faculty perspective, we must be more cognizant of the fact that this is a transition, a process, and one where we must share some responsibility for it.

Personally, I try not to ask the "but what does this have to do with" question, because I recognize it ultimately for what it is, a dodge. It's a means of transitioning a conversation to pedagogy, when it would simply be more honest to announce "New topic! Tell me about your teaching!" I first got the question at my first CCCC in Cincy in 91, hated it then, and hate it still. It's one of those horoscopic questions for which everyone must have an answer, for which no one has a truly interesting answer, and about which most people don't honestly have much interest. It requires both a reduction of our work and a simplification of the classroom in order to answer, and the answer presumes a correspondence that doesn't really obtain for most people. It's lazy.

But I'm drifting far afield. That it exists as a pressure for our students I don't dispute. That it is asked far too often in interviews I don't question. That we will ever fully exorcize this ghost--we who are far too fond of speaking of "the discipline" as though it were real--I do doubt. But there are questions that we could be asking and answering that might render it a little less haunting:

-What percentage of dissertations in our field take the (FYC) classroom as the primary site of research? Has that percentage changed substantially in the past 5, 10, 15 years?
-Of those that do not, how many contain the obligatory pedagesture? Has that number changed?
-Is this pattern observable in other ways? For example, have topics shifted in particular journals?

And so on. It's not a critique of Kopelson to say that these questions might provocatively build upon her work here, because I appreciate the framing of these issues that she provides. Perhaps I am projecting, but some of the exhaustion I sense in her conclusion, exhaustion over the self-referentiality of our scholarship, comes from the fact that we do an awful lot of framing of our selves, to the occasional exclusion of actual research. This is a topic I'm worrying over in a current project, one close to my own heart as well. If the end result of this article (and even this discussion) is that someone takes up these questions, then I'll be grateful.

I'll probably need to return to some of these questions--my sense of textual pacing is a little rusty--but for the moment, color me finished.

Okay. Don't blame me if this wasn't worth the wait.

I'm subbed to the ACRLog, and this came across the other day, a piece by "StevenB" about Why Students Want Simplicity And Why It Fails Them When It Comes To Research. The question of how to move students from "I'll just Google it" to a more nuanced, complex understanding both of research and of how to go about doing research is a topic near and dear to my heart. So I read with interest.

Two tangents. First, in the piece itself focuses on simplicity and complexity when it comes to research:

A defining quality of a complex problem is that right answers are not easily obtainable. Excepting those students who are passionate about the study matter and research project, most students would prefer to simplify their research as much as possible. The problem, as a new article points out, is that applying simple problem solving approaches to complex problems is a contextual error that will lead to failure.

For a long time, as I was working on my book manuscript, I had in mind something that I called my secret 6th chapter, the first 5 being revisions of the classical canons of rhetoric (and all beginning with the letter P, but that's even more tangential). The 6th chapter was going to be an exploration of another P word: plectics. I mistakenly believed that the word was mine all mine. Yeah, not so much. But anyhow, I'd planned on talking about how plectics might give us a spectrum along which to locate texts without recourse to the print/screen distinction. I've always been a fan of Deleuze's The Fold, and I'd never been happy with the assumption that even the most intricate and complicated print texts were simply linear compared with digital texts.

But alas, such a chapter was not to be. And that's the end of the first tangent.

Tangent #2 is a little shorter, and the reference in my title. StevenB draws on something called "Cynefin," which according to Wikipedia is a concept from Welsh:

The name Cynefin is a Welsh word which is commonly translated into English as 'habitat' or 'place', although that fails to convey the full meaning. A fuller translation would be that it convey the sense that we all have multiple pasts of which we are only partly aware: cultural, religious, geographic, tribal etc. The multiple elements of this definition and the inherent uncertainty implied were the reasons for the selection of the name.

The name seeks to remind us that all human interactions are strongly influenced and frequently determined by our experiences, both through the direct influence of personal experience, and through collective experience, such as stories or music.

What's really interesting to me here is the parallel between Cynefin and ethos, specifically as it's defined as "haunt" as both a location and something that affects us. It reminds me a little of Diane's writing--here's a little taste of "Finitude's Clamor; Or, Notes toward a Communitarian Literacy" from CCC, for example:

You (writing-being) are a limit-cruiser, so even when you're alone, you are not alone. You are (already) heavily populated with encounters, with others whom you have welcomed and who continue to work you over--to live on in you, haunting you and making demands of you--even in your solitude.

Someone with more experience than I in Wales will have to decide how many times removed cynefin is from ethos, but they sure sound related.

What's uninteresting to me about cynefin is its appropriation for the system that apparently bears its name. Maybe I need to do some background reading, but I have a tough time understanding how the term itself translates into a "decision-making framework" other than to serve as a reminder that not everything can be reduced to conscious decision-making frameworks. But oh well.

Back (finally!) to the entry itself. StevenB restricts himself in his discussion to 2 of the 5 "domains," simplicity and complexity, which runs the danger, it seems to me, of inscribing a binary between them. One of the things that I think we try to get at with the notion of inquiry is the habit of allowing "simple" to become "complex" through what this framework calls "emergent practices" (and perhaps even complicated). The ability to take complex questions and to simplify them is (to my mind) the difference that turns research into research writing.

But neither of these moves, simple->complex or complex->simple, is (a) easy, (b) frictionless, or (c) naturally acquired through osmosis. StevenB's suggestion is

that we add "identify and understand the context of the research problem and choose a decision-making style that matches that context" to that long list of information literacy skills that many of us list in some planning document.

And that's all well and good. But I guess I feel like that just identifies what is for many of us (and I presume, our students) the black box of academic research. I can come up with 407 examples of good writers (and designers) taking complicated questions, issues, and ideas, and helping to return them to simplicity (which is one effect of much writing that is good), but examples of moving in the other direction are few, in part because we tend to box up that part of things ourselves. And part of that is because, in academic prose, making the complex simple is one of the few near-universal justifications for the work that we do. Figuring out and articulating how we arrive at those complex problems is one of the things that a course focused on research writing could usefully accomplish.

That's all.

This semester, I'm supervising an independent study on visual rhetoric, an area that I've always had a passing interest in, but one where I wouldn't consider myself an expert. As a result, I'll be doing a lot more reading than is typical for me in an IS. I'm not complaining--I'd like to get a little more up to speed, and this is a good way to do it.

So anyhow, the first book we chose is James Elkins' Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (Amazon), both for its general overview of what is a fairly nebulous field (WJTMitchell calls it an "indiscipline") and for the skeptic part of it. I've read several of Elkins' books--he, along with Mitchell, Barbara Stafford, and a couple of others, is much of the basis for whatever expertise in visual theory I might lay claim to--and have always found him both accessible without being too evangelistic.

There's a section in VS:SI called "Ten Ways to Make Visual Studies More Difficult," and I found myself wondering what it would look like to try an analogous exercise for composition, rhetoric, and/or writing studies. "At the moment," Elkins writes, "visual studies is, to put it directly, too easy." His ideal?

I would like to see a visual studies that is denser with theories and strategies, more reflective about its own history, warier of existing visual theories, more attentive to neighboring and distant disciplines, more vigilant about its own sense of visuality, less predictable in its politics, and less routine in its choice of subjects....What matters most is the ease: visual studies is too easy to learn, too easy to practice, too easy on itself. I would like to see the field become so difficult that it can do justice to the immeasurable importance of visuality, which is still slighted throughout the university (65).

Substitute "writing" for "visuality" and all of a sudden, it sounds pretty familiar and (for me, at least) desirable.

Among various "cases" posed to his colleagues, Elkins closes with "The Case of the Writing Itself: The Challenge of Writing Ambitiously," wherein he urges his colleagues to know the field as completely as possible, to go beyond the name drop and to "do [their] sources the favor of a concerted encounter," and to write as well as they can. It reminded me in no small measure of what Latour says about writing sociology. It's easy enough advice to give out, but much harder to actually follow, but when I find writers from other disciplines convinced of how incredibly important writing is, I find it inspiring. Discussions like these make me want to be a better reader and a better writer.

And they make me want to write an article detailing ten ways to make writing studies more difficult, if for no other reason than my discipline's tendency to swing wildly towards inclusion as a solution for every perceived problem. Actually, as I write this, I think I need to distinguish between inclusion/exclusion, which is a pretty easy binary to resolve (i.e., one is good, one bad), and easy/difficult, which is less so. I don't think difficult necessitates exclusion, nor do I think Elkins is advocating that. I do think, though, that there are times where we make our field "easier" because we think it will thusly become more "inclusive." (And misguidedly so, on occasion, methinks.)

I think that's all I have for today. Although I will say that, if you have a passing interest in visuality, and want a decent overview of the "field"--and one that's well written--you could do far worse than Elkins. And I mean that literally--there is some real crap out there.

Okay. That's all.