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Reading Together

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Author: David Puerner

A Grass from the Past

A Grass from the Past

4/15/17

 

After going to conversation hour at the ESL center, dying eggs with all the amazing people who work there and who visit to work on their conversation I had the opportunity to chat with Johnny Yang a little bit about this project. He’s going to let us take over next friday to run the workshop, and things are really starting to shape up.

In the last week I’ve had conversations with Saundra Wright, Matt Brown, and together Allison and I had the opportunity to chat with Ela Thurgood to hear their thoughts about our project and the ways in which we might go through with it.

Saundra Wright recommended that we contact folks running the ENGL 130 classes including Seneca and Dalton so that we can advertise our event leading up to Friday so that we can try and get some good attendance. So far I’ve chatted with Dalton face to face, but I have yet to reach out to Seneca or any of the other 130 teachers. So this is part of my to-do list today before work if at all possible.

Matt Brown spent an hour chatting with me about Walt Whitman and the ways in which his approach to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass might be Multimodal. There’s an image of Walt Whitman further down above the entry for April 8th. This is the first image you would have seen of the poet if you picked up a copy of the self-published edition of Leaves of Grass published in 1855. What’s interesting is that Whitman does’t always present himself this way, and that potentially the decision to present himself as an “everyday farmer sort” was actually more rhetorical in nature than a first glance might glean.

Whitman is trying to make a statement about how this volume of poetry is not just for the Elite, but for everybody, including you.

So he’s using technology to subvert a tradition of poetry that has existed in America since its inception, and that has roots in Europe.

Multimodality in ENGL 431 is about challenging or updating the tradition of the Essay, and it seems to me their goals and messages run parallel to each other, and I wonder if a message similar to this existed at the birth of writing, or the birth of the printing press, or the telegraph, etc.. perhaps this technological bridge and the questions and frustrations that arise because of it are things we as a species are more familiar with than we realize having access to only a single lifetime.

Johnny the special events coordinator at the ESL Recourse Center told me I could make a poster for the event, so I found a template on my phone, and in less than 10 minutes had a flyer that looked pretty good actually. I have no artistic skills, so all the work the app makers did to make the process easy and user friendly is very much appreciated.

Finding Whitman Poster Big

After sending the poster to Johnny for approval he had me change the text from ESL Center to ESL Resource Center, and so far this is the final product.

What’s left to do after this leading up to friday is schedule a time to talk with Kim Jaxon and Chris Fosen about how to turn this whole thing into a “multimodal essay,” and to see if they can help me connect Walt Whitman’s work to the spirit of multimodality a little more clearly.

And of course there is the workshop itself, and two separate linguistics tests this week… which is scary to be honest.

Wish us luck,

David

 

 

4/13/17

So I’m starting to get this project narrowed down in my head. I feel like I’ve got traction, and I know who I want to talk to next.

I recorded this journal entry before work while it was hailing outside, and posted it on break before chowing down…. so tech allows you to do some pretty crazy things.

However, if this is supposed to be the kind of document that is both multimodal and does the kind of work an academic essay would do, it’s possible that things would become a little more formalized in the future. That being said, since part of this project is about documenting the whole processs being honest with the reality of how everything is coming together seems like a fair and justifiable move.

 

Happy Thursday,

David

 

 

 

 

Saturday 4/8/2017

I’ve reread Karen Karbiener’s introduction to the Barnes and Noble edition of Leaves of Grass; Walt Whitman’s most famous and most meticulously revised work, and I’ve asked her a few questions about Walt Whitman and his relationship with the cutting edge technologies of his day. My hypothesis is that Walt Whitman’s understanding of texts and circulation as well as of audience and purpose will place a few of Whitman’s actions and thoughts in the realm of Multimodal-equivalent.

In 2017 we talk about multimodality one way, but in the mid 19th century maybe Whitman would have used a similar term were it in their lexicon.

I hope to hear from her, but there’s no guarantees.

I’ve been thinking more about compiling pieces of the project into a separate blog that we’d turn in when the project is due. It could have a separate page for both a kind of thesis statement, perhaps an abstract if we felt we needed it, and more important a separate page for works cited information.

i have yet to ask Allison if she likes this part of the idea, but here’s hoping!

leaf II has been added tonight.

*Also if you want to see the original post scroll down.

**Will add more and newer updates we go.

 

 

Thursday 4/6/2017

For the final Multimodality project I’m upset that I can’t think of anything more technically savvy than a series of Youtube videos connected by theme and title, but that’s where I am. From what I understand this project either has to use multimodal techniques to design something that takes the place of a traditional academic text, or it has to be a project that explores the function of multimodality in academia with the purpose of trying to discover at least one way in which multimodality could be productive within the boundaries of a semester long class. I may have embellished this project a bit, but this is an angle that makes sense to me.

Now this is the part where I admit I’m not really the most technically savvy guy in the world, but that I’m willing to learn. On wednesday we were talking about what kinds of ways you might grade or evaluate a multimodal kind of text, and to me this seems like a very hard thing to do. This class has spent a lot of time challenging formulaic writing, and it seems to me that the urge to formalize and confine multimodal approaches to the creation of academic texts would be counter productive, and we as a discipline would derive all the same problems we see currently in the teaching of formulaic writing that we see today.

So what I think this will be is an exploration of Multimodality through the genre of a typical college paper like we’ve all seen a hundred times. In other places in the school I have heard my fellow English majors lament the difficulty of producing a paper in their Shakespeare or Chaucer classes that is both well researched and ‘in dialogue’ with the scholarship on the subject that has come before.

Texts being ‘in dialogue’ with other texts that have come before, and perhaps even being in dialogue with future, unwritten, and even yet-unthought-of texts is something I’ve run into time and time again. When Matt Brown introduced my class to Walt Whitman last semester this was one of the main ideas he posited; that Walt Whitman’s 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass was in dialogue with future readers, with the American people as well as with other writers. At the end of Song of Myself Walt Whitman actually addresses the reader from the page when he writes, “Listener up there!”

The wordslinger was breaking a lot of conventions by doing that. In so many ways he dedicated his life to defying convention whilst simultaneously delivering true-depth with every attempt. Yes I may be a little biased. The point is Walt was anything but formulaic, and his message seems to be simpatico with the thesis of our class. So I want to explore the life and work of Walt Whitman through Multimodality. Which is my attempt at making Multimodality do the kind of work that a traditional paper might do.

This would be my half of the project.

On the other hand Allison Clark has expressed the desire to somehow incorporate our work at the ESL center into our project. Several times this semester she has reminded me, without trying to, that eventually we may have to teach these things to students in a classroom setting, and not only that, but we’re going to have to make these kinds of things useful to students. I fear that most often my approach to dealing with the subjects we’ve explored in this class have been from the vantage point of a student myself with the focus being how might these ideas be incorporated into my own process and style, where her’s has been more forward thinking in terms of how might these approaches benefit and alter academia as a whole (sorry if I’m putting words in your mouth Allison, but this is how you’ve helped me re-think these things over the semester). So it occurs to me that both might be good things to explore.

How can I personally (or we) use multimodality to do the kind of work that your standard academic text does, and how can I as a future teacher (or we as future teachers) use multimodality effectively in the classroom. It would make sense that our discipline would one day require aptitude in both of these areas to be considered effective teachers. And Frankly the prospect is a little daunting, but fear was made to be conquered right? So here comes the idea for the project:

  • Film the project from start to finish like a documentary. Film brainstorming sessions about the project so that we can document our process and they way in which the idea for whatever the final product turns out to be was born.
  • Speak with Saundra and Johnny and see if we can create a Walt Whitman workshop-ish thing that we can advertise and get people to show up for at an ESL conversation hour which takes place every Friday at 4 or 5 pm.
    • The workshop:
      • Walt Whitman uses a lot of “I am” statements In the 1855 version of Leaves of Grass”
      • “I am the mashed fireman with breastbone broken…”
      • “I am an old artillerist”
      • “I the poet of the body/ and I am the poet of the soul”
      • So I thought it would be cool to show people some good passages of Whitman, maybe paired with some images of nature and the diversity of people who live here and make of America (Humans of New York would be a cool resource) since diversity as an American theme seems to have a universal appeal in most cases.
      • After the little pre-activity we could ask the participants to come up with a few of their own “I am statements” then have them read their statements together.
      • The hope being that was as a group can arrange the statements to create our own leaves of grass styled poem with statements generated by our ESL students and tutors.
      • With their permission they will allow us to film it and use that for our final project.
  • I’d also like to film/document conversations with Allison about the project, and some of the conversations we will have to have with our profs to pull this workshop off.
  • Finally I think this whole thing might culminate in a short reflective essay that will be posted on a blog somewhere.
    • In fact, just brainstorming here, it might be good to put this whole thing on its own blog so that the blog itself could be the final academic text.

Allison this is mostly for you and Kim. I’d love to hear your thoughts, and if you have any questions or concerns please shoot me an email or give me a call.

-David

Walt Whitman, America^

I love this guy so much.

 

Beginning to document the process^

 

 

Abby Normal

Abby Normal

 

 

I’m intrigued by the idea of Multimodality. In Saundra Wright’s Morphology and Syntax class we looked at a big-time linguist’s book chapter entitled The Language Mavens. The chapter was about a group of prescriptivist grammar-zealots who spend a lot of their time policing the grammar of others, and pitching a tried and true, “get off my lawn” tip argument that went something like this: “Gone are the days of a great American populace wielding proper grammar and succinctly clear sentences… what remains is mere shambles of the languages once great and shining past.” It all boils down to the belief that the current culture is not paying enough attention to how they are using English and as such they are making egregious mistakes that could be avoided should anyone care to do the work.

 

The author of the chapter does not subscribe to this prescriptivist viewpoint.

 

In any language there might be two kinds of grammar. One is prescriptive and has to do with the defined ‘rules’ of grammar, and the other is descriptive and has to do with how grammar and syntax is actually constructed by real people in a real society 9meaning not just in an academic paper, but cut loose in the wild).

 

Pinker (the author of the work) give’s this example:

 

He describes a teenager responding to a parent’s utterance with the use of the phrase, “I could care less.”

 

The parent responds with understandable frustration and says, “I COULDN’T care less.”

 

The emphasis being on the word, couldn’t.

Pinker says that while the Prescriptivist might be technically correct s/he is also working very hard to ignore the context of the teenager’s response which is swaddled closely in weapon’s grade sarcasm and therefore perfectly understandable (regardless of perceived grammatical infraction) within the context of sarcasm and frustration.

 

Descriptivists might examine the context of a conversation and an utterance more closely and find that even though a phrase or an utterance might break a prescriptive rule, the descriptive, more-natural usage is ‘correct.’

 

I feel like this is where the English discipline and Multimodality conversation will be inevitably heading. There will be some who, more comfortable with the standard essay and standard modes of english-majory analysis who will call for a return to the greatness that was the essay and the academic journal, and there will be others who embrace the perceived shift of significance from the exclusive domain of the essay to other multimodal avenues of expression and conveyance. There will be a place for the essay for a long time to come, but it too will evolve to find ever-greater levels of significance and effectiveness as the technology we as a species use evolves even faster.

 

Sorry if any of this was just meaningless-jargon. I’m in a strange mood today. Hopefully the video will further explore a couple of the issues I personally had attempting to make the switch from the essay to the visual.

 

Sincerely,

David

 

PS- I remember in Deep Space Nine, an old Star Trek show that I loved almost as much as Voyager a lot of the crew members walked around the space station reading on tablets. They depicted a world where whatever information you could possibly think of was available at the fingertips just as soon as you wanted it, and that being the case I think we are almost there. I could be shortsighted myself, but imagine the technology associated with the amber alert being used to send out a visual (or otherwise multimodal) argument to the tablets and phones and other gadgets people used. That would be the spread of information in such a way that people would have to react to either positively of negatively, especially if it was tied to a political end. I could see Martin Luther’s 95 Theses making an impact in that way today.

Multimodal Drift

Multimodal Drift

Update 2:03 After hoping through every hoop imaginable this is the best I can do so far…. now why dafuq does the video cover so much area? Anyway, this user-friendly experience brought to you by digital-gremlins, “You might not be flying a plane, but you can still feel crashed and burnt.” Cheers, enjoy the rest of the post.

 

 

 

 

Update 1:29: So this is where I’m at right now. As far as multimodality is concerned it seems money is going to be a major limiting factor that will determine who gets to play and who gets left out. So me right now, my MacBook, while still awesome as fuck, is from 2009 and doesn’t have an AirDrop application that I can use to move any of the video files from my phone to my laptop. Another option I’ve been attempting is moving the video file from my phone either directly to YouTube, or to google drive. Either way I can then upload the video to Kim’s blog. But I’m running into an upload problem and I’m thinking that whatever kind of lose as I have doesn’t allow for video beyond 5-ish minutes of length, or perhaps my wi-fi connection is not optimal… whatever the case may be I’m definitely fighting against the technology at the moment, which says to me that those who can afford or have access to the most current systems and technologies are the ones who are going to have the greatest mobility when we make the switch to approaching multimodal communication techniques in composition type courses. What do y’all think? Also this battle isn’t over. It’s not a great video, but I’m getting this shit posted if it kills me!

Immediately after finishing this^ chunk of text this is the current status of the video upload *Actually there is no need for a picture because it would look exactly the same… no progress whatsoever. FML

 

 

Update 8:30am: I’ve spent 4 to 5 hours of my life trying to upload a vlog from my phone. This has been hell. This isn’t over, but for now this is all you get.

 

So I decided to give the Vlog thing a try after writing two versions of this post and being dissatisfied with both. After class today I plopped down on the couch with the cat, listened to an hour or two of The Gunslinger then remembered that Dave Chapelle was on Netflix. I love Dave. I love him not only because we share a name and every semester I walk up on campus like, “Still Dangerous.” It’s a slogan from his old show.

Anyway, I’d heard folks on Facebook up in arms about the content of his specials and I hoped his stuff wouldn’t be what some reactions on Facebook suggested it might be; that is not only offensive, but insensitive. He definitely crossed some lines that make me uncomfortable, and I tend to chalk it up to his age and his generation, but since he’s a hero of mine he tends to get a lot of leeway with me too. Anyways the biggest thing that bothers me is his dialogue with Rape that he engages with in episode one.

My coworker Carissa said, “I’ve seen some of his jokes online, and I can see why some people might find them funny but they’re not for me. I didn’t find them funny.”

My coworker Stephen said, “I don’t think you love Chapelle the way I do.” The subtext reading, in my mind, I don’t think you can handle the subject matter without being offended. The assumption being, You’re a virtue signaling liberal, and Imma define who you are based on that label right now. Bothers me a bit, but me and him are cool. And he’s probably right a little bit, from a certain light, but I like so many of us take pride in defying assumption whenever possible.

To both, after both opinions had been posited, I said, “We gotta learn to drop the academics.” The subtext being, I validate both your opinions simultaneously by implying that my educated side agrees with the moderate opinion of the one, and that my 916 is ready to roll with Chapelle on the other hand. In certain cases agreeability and civility could be seen as a civic-level sin if it boarders on the edge of complacency. Saving-face in the presence of true suffering should always be a sin, right?
This blog post and the Vlog up above does a couple of things. 1. It documents my feelings about a topical subject right now. So if my opinion changes in the morning, I’ll still have a record of what it was today. 2. It required me to compose my thoughts in real time, and without a script the best tool I had at my disposal for making the video more clear was the deletion of the first video and the shooting of a “take two.” 3. This last paragraph is attempting to point out a few of the moltimodal features the combination of video and blog post attempts to employ.

So what do you guys think about the new Dave Chapelle comedy special?

And is there anything else our class’s blog posts are doing with multimodal features?

Fear and Loathing at Chico State

Fear and Loathing at Chico State

“Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly”

– Frida Kahlo

“If you have no critics you’ll likely have no success.”

– Malcolm X

Fear and Loathing at Chico State (draft)

In the Western imagination we seem to have a fetish for dividing the world’s history into a series of well defined goal-posts. In elementary school growing up I studied civil-rights with my class and the way it was presented, the textbooks made it seem like there was a problem, a group of people got together in a very cordial kind of way (revolution was an abstraction without any real meaning or weight), and the things people wanted, their rights or perhaps objects, were achieved shortly after identification and remain fixtures in modern society to this day. From what I understand about businesses, across the country the upper echelons of top organizations lay out sets of quarterly goals, and whether or not a firm is perceived as successful is often dependent upon reaching those goals in some kind of quantifiable way.

This fetish exists in American pop culture as well. For artists the quality of an individual might be defined by publication or gallery time; for musicians, record and ticket-sales; for filmmakers whether or not they’re holding that little golden statue at the end of the year. Goal-posts, ‘victories,’ and the trophies by which we commemorate achievement become the metric by which we as Western-born thinkers begin to define and categorize our world, and if this fetish exists ubiquitously through all levels of American Society (to varying degrees) then is it so hard to imagine goal-posts, objectives, and end-goals constituting one of the ways by which we quantify and measure writing?

As I journey down this Literacy studies rabbit-hole one quote still calls out to me. It is a simple statement, but it exposes a philosophy in Western thought that perhaps underpins every instance of insane-frustration I, and others like myself have felt, while struggling with the written word inside and out of the institution of Big Education.

…people tend to experience writing as a finished product that represents ideas in seemingly rigid forms but also…writing is often seen as a ‘basic skill’ that a person can learn once and for all and not think about again (Wardle and Adler-Kassner 15).

I think about that time I was standing in the kitchen of a two bedroom apartment trading rhetorical blows with a smug asshole who thought he could make a punchline of my liberal arts degree by saying something along the lines of, “Yeah but you can already read, so why waste your time?” He saw my world and my interests as “throwing money at some ambiguous ideal” without guarantee of payoff at the end….

I doubt he could have articulated that at the time though.

To be unfair the SOB was looking down at me from the “dauntingly lucrative” position of being enrolled at Chico State as a Performing arts major who specialized in percussion. That’s drums by the way. And to back his point he then told me a story about how his assessment at Butte College included reading and writing, and that he’d achieved the highest level you could achieve on their assessment test.

“I’m level 5 in both.” He knew he was being a douche. Through smiling eyes he let his mouth hang open, a silent yeah hanging in the air between us as he agreed with himself. He’d baited the hook sure, and I knew nothing I said would change his mind, but I did feel insulted, and more than that I felt like all the people I’d come to know and love had been reduced to individual punchlines; or people who held no worth outside of academia according to this particular percussionist’s viewpoint.

I remember looking him and the eye. “That’s the difference. You’re reading level 5, and I’m literate.”

If I’d had a microphone that’s when I would have dropped it.

I don’t think he understood me then, and I’m not sure I knew exactly what I was saying then either. But what must have been on my mind was some half-formed notion that said I’m not going to let the system define what’s “good enough” for me, and you (my percussionist friend) have placed too much faith in systems of measurement neither of us played any role in defining. But I think this anecdote underscores the point that the predilection to view Literacy and Composition as “endpoints” or goalposts is something that really exists in our society, and the implications are myriad.

I’ll give you just three:

  1. Shallowness

There comes a time every semester where I start to understand what kind of creature I’m dealing with. Make no mistake, a class and its teacher are very much a living organism that students must come to grapple with… Ultimately the grade we receive at the end of the semester is a single-letter survival narrative where a happy ending, and indeed “survival,” isn’t always guaranteed. Using the language of this course, the object or objects of the classroom are rarely explicitly growth and education by an easy and straight-forward understanding of both words. More often the objects of any classroom is Performance.

The tone of that final “Survival narrative” grade at the end of the semester is dependent on a students ability to divine the proper Modes of Performance for that particular class, that particular semester, and to never alienate the authority figure in charge (the teacher) so much so that their final letter grade is hurt beyond hope of recovery. Part of this navigation is figuring out what’s sayable in class and on paper.

There are some classes that encourage the voicing of true-thoughts, insights, and inquiries… and there are many more classes that encourage the learning of a script. Anything you say in class is valid so long as it’s on the script. In such a class you can only violate the tenets of the script once or twice in learning its boundaries before you risk changing the tone of that “single-letter survival narrative” at the end of the semester; the grade.

Why this semester alone I’m enjoying one class where I have the freedom, it seems, to say whatever the fuck I want so long as it’s productive and has a point in-line with the kind of inquiry this particular class is engaged in. I also have a class where I’m having to learn my prof’s opinions, and I already know I will be tested on being able to regurgitate her opinions on the bubble test as if they were fact, and not on my understanding of the discipline as it exists outside of her understanding, in reality. That second class wounds me morally on a day to day basis, and it is the kind of thing that would have undermined my academics back at Butte College (the JC that seems to feed into Chico State most efficiently).

But I’ve learned to be more compliant with hoop-jumping, and beyond that I’ve come to understand that even a situation like that may yield little nuggets of insightful gold if I approach it with a more-open mind, and relegate my own inquiries to the margins for further exploration when there is time, and when the teacher isn’t looking… and certainly never on the test.

In Reading Classrooms as Texts Jennie Nelson call these kinds of moves I’m engaging in on a semester to semester basis “Classroom Literacy.” Basically if you can’t understand the words in a book or an article you’re going to have a hard time getting anything positive from the time spent reading the book or article, and if you can’t read the teacher and the climate of her or his class then just like before you’re going to have a hard time getting anything positive from the time spent engaging with said class.

That and you’re “single-letter survival narrative” might be come an extinction narrative. Nelson goes on to describe the classroom in this way:

As members of the culture of school, students learn the routines of school, work, including lectures, seat work, tests, homework. They learn acceptable patterns of behavior, such as when and how to ask questions, and what kinds of responses are expected in class discussions (Nelson 412).

Already you begin to see how the ideals of growth and education are undermined by the necessity to perform well, and the crisis of being dumped into a situation where a course syllabus may or may not shed light on what a successful performance may entail.

Sink or swim you know?

I myself have faced a particular crossroads a number of times. I understand the grading of words can be highly arbitrary, and I’ve done my best to figure out which of my professors more readily appreciate my style so that I can stack the deck in my favor whenever possible when looking at which classes to chose for the next semester. Nelson goes on to say that, “…in learning how to be successful members of the culture of school, students develop interpretive practices and approaches that may undermine the goals of disciplinary learning” (Nelson 412). And to me this is another symptom of goal-post and achievement culture.

The “pressure to perform” well in any given situation is a pressure that promotes competition that A-grade, or that 4.0, or that trophy, or that great job (all synonyms for achievements and goal-posts in this culture of ours). So these pressures then function to undermine true-learning and true-exploration, because oftentimes that kind of learning and exploration would violate teacher expectations and therefore be a detriment to performing well in the classroom.

This is how we teach and promote compliance. In fact it’s gross, but compliance might actually be a part of our professional culture at the middle and lower-class socioeconomic levels. So I have to ask myself how does this culture and climate protect the status-quo? Perhaps this is a question I’ll have the stomach to return to in the course of this essay, but for now let it suffice to say that our goal-post fetish, as applied to writing seems to undermine true-thought and true-exploration, and true-innovation in my opinion.

We are teaching people to walk and to only walk, and to ignore their wings completely, and to be honest I know a lot of Professors who would have failed Freda Kahlo for daring to do otherwise. Wing-using is not in-line with compliance, and unless you prove the use of wings (metaphorically speaking of course) is economically viable your performance, and the results of said performance may be used as an example to teach compliance to the generations that come after.

“Remember when that one person tried to use their wings? Well they died, and if you ask me they were kind of asking for it weren’t they?”

I should probably show more restraint.

Moving on.

  1. Gatekeeper-Culture

XXX

  1. Undermined Democracy

XXX