One University's Expansion is Another Community's Destruction

Deborah Brandt speaks of literacy sponsors as agents who actively promote, enable, or suppress literacy. I'd like to attempt in this blog post to do a bit of literacy sponsorship about questions of city politics, eminent domain, the war in Iraq, and the consequences for city residents. Bear with me....


Nellie Bailey from the Harlem Tenant's Association spoke at the Feminism and War Conference last week. She called the audience's attention to Columbia University's proposed expansion into West Harlem. The press release below explains the plan for gentrification and the protest launched last spring. Eminent Domain is being evoked by Columbia. Some may remember Yale University's similar expansion into surrounding neighborhoods.

Note the troping in the press release on Hurricane Columbia--reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina. Ms. Bailey also spoke at the Feminism and War Conference of the effects of the war on working class city residents, the draining off of public funds to go toward the war effort. She evoked the failed levees (and the failed effort to fix them due to choices by public officials) in New Orleans. Her argument: the decision not to fix the levees was tied into the desire to siphon public funds away from federal coffers to the war effort. The war in Iraq, she argued, is a war on poor people in Iraq AND in American cities. As we spend more and more money on the war effort, we spend less and less on public services that will aid the working class and the poor. Also, it's a war fought by an all-volunteer force, many of whom "volunteered" because of economic reasons: the military is a way out of poverty--what many call the poverty draft.

She spoke of the linkages between public policies and their consequences--especially their consequences for working class African American neighborhoods.

I think many of us would like to see our universities as progressive forces within our communities, not see them as landlords, empire builders, and agents of environmental racism. Yet the story of Columbia encroaching on Harlem and using eminent domain is not an unfamiliar one. In Syracuse, we have several cases where eminent domain is being evoked:

--The fight over the creation of a Midland Avenue Sewage Treatment Plant here in Syracuse in a working class, African American neighborhood. For more on this and on environmental racism, see
http://www.esf.edu/org/seac/midland.htm

--Pyramid Corporation and the expansion of the Carousel Mall for the DESTINY project. This is not a case of environmental racism, but it is a case of a larger entity forcing an expansion on a group of businesses already housed within the mall.
http://www.syracuse.com/destinyusa/updates/
Looks like Pyramid is winning this one this time, but will Destiny ever be?

The Feminism and War Conference challenged me to think about these global-local linkages and about the priorities for public funding in the face of what I consider an unjust and immoral war. It also got me and my family out to a peace rally last Friday in the freezing rain with "War Kills Children" sign in the hands of my four year old daughter. It also made me think more about the relationship of the university to the community--its responsibility to be a public good. Chancellor Cantor is always challenging us to think about being a public good--how is Columbia University being a public good as it seeks to take up West Harlem? How can SU be a public good in this fight against Midland's Treatment Plant? In the fight over cleaning up Onondaga Lake?



For Immediate Release: April 22, 2006 DEMO DAY

CONTACT CELL NO: Tom DeMott (917 969-0669)
Alt: #'s: Nellie Bailey (212) 234-5005 or Luis Tejada (212) 234-3002 (se
habla espanol),

April 27, Harlem Community Fights Hurricane Columbia’s Proposed Expansion

On Thursday, April 27th from 4P.M. until 6:30 P.M. in front of the main gate
of Columbia University at 116th and Broadway, hundreds of Harlem residents,
workers, students, business owners and supporters from across the city will
demonstrate against the University’s proposed 5 billion-dollar thirty-year
expansion into the Manhattanville section of West Harlem. Not since 1968 has
Columbia University faced such community opposition. Demonstrators are protesting
the University’s attempt to move forward like a hurricane evicting and
destroying this historic Harlem community and damaging the surrounding neighborhoods.
Members of the Coalition to Preserve Community, the West Harlem Business Group
and the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification will express support
for development under the community-based 197A plan, initiated a decade
before the University's plan, which would protect the very businesses and
residential buildings that Columbia seeks to remove as well as provide for compensatory
mechanisms addressing secondary displacement.

Community Demands Leases for Local Businesses
Workers and owners of businesses at 3251 Broadway, which has five floors full
of skilled auto mechanics and a basement antique restoration business have
been worried about their future ever since Columbia purchased the building a
few months ago and immediately tried to shut down the elevator that serves all the
occupants. Community residents will express their solidarity with them and will
demand that Columbia give leases to all of them. "We have skilled workers here
who earn a good living and support their families. They will not be finding
employment at Columbia's biotech labs and our jobs are protected under the 197A
plan," said Jovani Dominguez, the owner of New Millennium Auto Repair.
Columbia Threatens Eminent Domain to Businesses and Residents
Columbia is harassing businesses and distributing PR brochures without
reference to the current commercial and residential uses. Anne Whitman, owner of
Hudson Moving, states: "They are pretending we don't exist. If Columbia and Mr.
Bollinger truly believed in and supported "affirmative action" in the real
world, they would not threaten a 100% woman owned business in a 100% woman owned
property with 100% women and minority employees. I am not for sale and neither
are the other businesses and residents!"
Rob Rosello, a tenant in 3289 Broadway who has been working for years to
convert his building to a low-income home-ownership cooperative under the
city's Tenant Interim Lease program, speaks of the need for solidarity. "My building,
and those tenants in other buildings nearby who are facing eviction, like 602
West 132nd Street, have supported the 197 A plan because it supports the idea
that longtime residents should have a chance at ownership. The backbone
position of the 197A plan is that those who want to stay should be able to
stay and that includes us. We support the workers at 3251 Broadway and the other
businesses in the area that have right to stay here along with those who live
here."

Biotech Research Raises Health and Safety Concerns
The decision by Columbia, with a history of EPA violations concerning
hazardous materials, to place a biotech research center in the midst of a residential
neighborhood is a concern that goes beyond the immediate Harlem community.
Its proximity to the Hudson River and to an earthquake fault, recent biotech
accidents, and the likelihood of military-related research in this age of extra
vigilance due to bio-terrorist fears, heightens anxiety. The community will not
allow the University to replace long-term residents with money-making
biodefense contracts and shiny new Biolevel #3 labs. This is a residential
neighborhood and its residents are not willing to be accident victims.

Demands to Bollinger
The Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, working with
community groups, say that Columbia students are increasingly questioning the
University's plans to convert a vibrant and diverse neighborhood into an
institutional company town. The students will help get the community's demands to
CU's President Bollinger. Bryan Mercer of the Student Coalition said, "We
believe the community needs a voice and our job is to try and do something
sensible here, not bulldoze people out."

RALLY AT 5:30: Speakers will include business owners, workers, and
residential tenants facing eviction, as well as longtime community residents, clergy,
members of local non-profits and students.

FOR MORE INFO, CONTACT: Coalition to Preserve Community: Tom DeMott (cell:
917 969-0669) (212) 666-6426 or bfrappy24@aol.com) or Nellie Bailey (212)
234-5005, or Luis Tejada (212) 234-3002 (se habla espanol),
West Harlem Business Group: Anne Whitman cell 917 705-2922 (212) 678-4862 or
Nick Sprayregan cell: (917)-299-0907 or (212) 368-1717
Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification: Nell Geiser
(646)-296-5927, Bryan Mercer (267)-252-6542 or Lee Norsworthy (856) 371-6123

Graduate School as the Parlor

Browsing the 601 blogs tonight, I see not only the notes about what we are reading in the class, but other texts and subtexts. Laurie and Terri both introduced the question of dipping into conversations in the graduate program or in conferences or other spaces of the academic community. Laurie framed her response in relation to the Feminism and War Conference and David Bartholomae's essay "Inventing the University." As I read their (your!) posts, I couldn't help but think about the well-worn quotation from Kenneth Burke about the "parlor." I think it fits what happens with one's entrance into any new discourse community, but I think it is especially helpful for meditating on what happens upon entering graduate school.

"Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress."

Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (110-11)

Note the idea of getting to a conversation "late" with others not able to "retrace for you all the steps that had gone before." Sound familiar? Note the listening until the "tenor" of an argument is caught before dipping your "oar" in and making your voice heard. I think that what might be a further issues to plumb is how to put your oar into the water. We need Kelly Rawson here to give us some lessons in paddling a canoe (Kelly, are you still out there ??). But it's a real question: how to you put your oar in the water, how to move ahead, how do you move with the current (or fight against it)?

Some might shout "Just do IT." The Nike ad. Lace up and start running. What about stretching? What about warmup, though, the preparation-oriented person might ask?

OK, I've got a lot of mixed metaphors here. Sitting in a parlor, rowing, running, bear with me, OK? What we ask you to do in this program is damn hard: juggling three and sometimes four classes, teaching, professional development, service. Time management advice abounds, but there is a lot going on these first few months (and years, right?). There is doing the work (teaching, scholarship, classes service, etc), then there is also doing the emotional work of doing the work. That is yet a whole other layer. Then there is the layer of preparing for the future while also doing everything that needs to get done in the immediate sense.

I hear you. At the same time, many of us will tell you how lucky you are to have this time to read and think because you won't have it as a junior faculty member with new courses to teach and pressures to publish and direct writing programs or do other dept. and university work. Meanwhile, you may wonder what it means to have time to read and think because you may not feel you have enough time to read and think and absorb and make sense of the readings.

I return to the parlor, though. You come in later and you often leave later. Part of getting in and engaging the conversation is accepting the condition of being somewhat late to it and not always on even footing.

Anyway, my two cents worth on a Saturday night....

The Greenbelt Movement

Wangari Matthai has improved the environment of her native Kenya by persuading the women of Kenya to plant trees. In doing so, she has launched the greenbelt environmental movement. The planting of trees has reduced erosion, rejuvenated the environment, provided firewood for families, and allowed for sustainable crops. Her efforts to improve the environment and make women's lives better won her the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. On Tuesday afternoon, she spoke to a packed crowd at Hendrick's Chapel. I asked the 601 class to attend the lecture after class if they could, and I got to listen in for about 30 minutes before rushing off to pick up Autumn. Micere Mugo from African American Studies gave a beautiful introduction and taught the audience to clap three times in unison to greet Matthai in the traditional Kenyan way.

What struck me about Matthai's speech was how integrated her perspective is. She spoke of understanding the "linkages" between the environment and human choices. Cutting down the forests to grow cash crops of coffee and tea resulted in a monocultural environment. Growing lumber for harvesting resulted in "dead forests" devoid of insect and animal life. She noticed erosion in the rainy season when she was out in the field "picking ticks" for her research on diseases in cattle. She saw how interconnected the environmental problems were to human choices. She saw, as she put it, "the "linkages." She hatched a plan and began to organize and connect women, building solidarity. I'd like to learn more about how she made arguments and mobilized people.

Hearing about the greenbelt movement reminded me of Chipko, the movement of women in India who literally hugged trees to protect them from being bulldozed for timber. The expression "tree-hugger" derives from that organization. Vandana Shiva (my all-time heroine) was one of the women involved in this movement before she went on to become involved in organizing Indian farmers to resist biopiracy and the genetic engineering of food. More on her in a later post.

What happens to scholars over time: The citation life

So what happens to scholars over time? We have a tendency to fossilize people in time, often. when we read their essays in anthologies. How does their work evolve and change and respond to different questions that the field poses? That they pose?

See Linda Flower's work on community as an example of where she takes her thinking on cognition.. Consider how the titles change (below), yet encompass her core interests. Note also how a specific inquiry site (a literacy center) focuses a lot of her publications in a local venue.

The key question is how do we continue to work and rework our key intellectual questions that take on different twists, turns, forms, and methodologies. Note how her book contains the phrasing "social cognitive theory of writing."

One could do the same with Andrea Lunsford, Mike Rose, etc. Watch how their intellectual projects unfold over time. Trish and I were talking the other week about James Berlin's work, and I mentioned Victor Vitanza's grad. course on Berlin. Vitanza's course unfolds Berlin's lifetime of work and addresses the roots of his terminologies.

I think that an exercise like this is useful to consider for many of the major theorists/researchers we read this semester. Where does their work start, where does it go, how does it take different shapes and why? How does this reflect larger intellectual trends and patterns of the field and of knowledge making, new technologies?

This is worth thinking about in relation to our work. The moment is always important--kairos. But how are we simply working on the same project over a lifetime? My dissertation director Lynn Worsham always maintained that we are working on the same project, just in different forms. I've always thought that was true.



This is the html version of the file http://english.cmu.edu/research/clc/Com_Lit_Bib.pdf.
COMMUNITY LITERACY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890
Dr. Linda Flower (lf54+@andrew.cmu.edu)
(412) 268-2863 FAX: 412-268-7989
Publications:

Flower, L. (1994). The construction of negotiated meaning A social cognitive theory of writing.
Carbondale, IL: University of Southern Illinois Press.

Flower, L. (1996). Literate action. In L.Z. Bloom, D. A. Daiker, & E. M. White (Eds.),
Composition in the Twenty-first century: Crisis and change (pp. 249-260). Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press.

Flower, L. (1996). Negotiating the meaning of difference. Written Communication, 13 (1), 44-92.

Flower, L. (1996). Collaborative planning and community literacy: A window on the logic of
learners. In L. Schauble & R. Glaser (Eds.), Innovations in learning: New environments for
education (pp. 25-48). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Flower, L. (1997). Partners in inquiry: A logic for community outreach. In L. Adler-Kassner,
R. Crooks, & A. Watters (Eds.), Writing the community: Concepts and models for service-learning
in composition (pp. 95-117). Washington, DC: American Association of Higher Education.

Flower, L. (1997). Observation-based theory building. In Gary Olson & Todd Taylor (Eds.),
Publishing in rhetoric and composition (pp. 163-185). Urbana, IL: NCTE

Flower, L. (1998) Problem-solving strategies for writing in college and community. 4th edition
ISBN: 0155054961 : Heinle

Flower, L. (2000). The Evolution of Intercultural Inquiry: Interview with Linda Flower.
Reflections On Community-Based Writing Instruction. 1 (2) Fall, 3-4.

Flower, L. (2002). Intercultural Knowledge Building: The Literate Action of a Community Think Tank.
Writing Selves and Society: Research from Activity Perspectives. Ed. C. Bazerman & D. Russell.
Fort Collins, CO: WAC Clearinghouse

Flower, L. (2002). Intercultural inquiry and the transformation of service. College English,
65 (2), 181-201.

Flower, L. (2003). Talking Across Difference: Intercultural Rhetoric and the Search for Situated
Knowledge. College Composition and Communication, 55(1), 38-68.

Flower, L., & Deems, J. (2002). Conflict in community collaboration. In J. M. Atwill & J. Lauer
(Eds.), New perspectives on rhetorical invention. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press.


Flower, L., & Flach, J. (1996). Working partners: An urban youth report on risk, stress, and respect.
Pittsburgh, PA. The Community Literacy Center and Carnegie Mellon University.


Flower, L., Long, E., & Higgins, L. (2000). Learning to rival: A literate practice for
intercultural inquiry. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Flower, L., and S. Heath. (2000). Drawing on the local: Collaboration and community expertise.
Journal of Language and Learning Across the Disciplines, 4, ( 3 )October, 43-55,

Page 2
Community Literacy Bibliography

Flower, L., Wallace, D., Norris, L., & Burnett, R. E. (Eds.). (1994). Making thinking visible:
Writing, collaborative planning, and classroom inquiry. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Flower's work also is evident in the dissertations she has directed.

Play up Sex!

Well, it's not fair of me to highlight the straight from the Id comments from the professor in the protocol analysis from Flower and Hayes "play up sex" (p. 295), but I can't help it! It screams out at me. It also says how he imagines (or not) his discourse community. I've already had a little fun with it on Tanya's blog, so I'll try to tone in down here. I'll just mark it as an item of interest and do a dutiful job of trying to account for the Flower and Hayes article "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing" (1981 CCC). This article must be read as part of a larger body of work produced by Flower and Hayes and also by Flower who wrote a much utilized textbook and also has newer work that incorporates work with a community literacy partnership. I'll dig up some links to the larger body of their work in another post.

First, off, let me comment that it is pretty quiet in the blogosphere right now. Is everyone battening down for the winter? Putting up storm windows, digging out those long lost snowboots and winter socks or rushing out to get the first ever pair? (I'm imagining Trish out there getting some boots)?

Tom, Autumn, and I squeezed in a birthday trip for him Friday and Saturday to Rochester, so we had a nice time there. Autumn also has a new winter coat--pink in contrast to all the blue ones I've selected for her in year's past. But that is another discourse community to be plumbed in another post....

Well, it's not quiet on Laura's blog where she has engaged in a call and response with Mina Shaughnessy. Check it out. Preach it!

As for Flower and Hayes, the first few pages are a useful overview of the composing process research up to 1981 (Britton; Moffett; Kinneavy; Odell, Cooper and Courts). Emig? Bitzer and Vatz are mentioned as those coming at questions of audience from a rhetorical perspective. They point out, though, that this research does not necessarily answer the question: "What guides the decisions that writers make as they write?" (273). They want to understand how writers negotiate that decision-making. "This paper will introduce a theory of the cognitive processes involved in composing in an effort to lay groundwork for more detailed study of thinking processes of writing" (274). They develop four key points in relation to setting forth a cognitive process theory model:

"1)The process of writing is best understood as a set of distinctive thinking processes which writers orchestrate or organize during the act of composing

2) These processes have a hierarchical, highly embedded organization in which any given process can be embedded within any other.

3) The act of composing itself is a goal-directed thinking process guided by the writer's own growing network of goals.

4) Writers create their own goals in two key ways: by generating both high-level goals and supporting sub-goals which embody the wrtier's developing sense of purpose, and then, at times, by changing major goals or even establishing entirely new ones based on what has been learned in the act of writing" (275).

They go on to question further the "stage" models of the composing process and then elaborate in further detail (in some cases quite complex) how their model is a "major departure fromt the traditional paradigm of stages" (276). I won't belabor all the problems they find with the stage models, but their model is an improvement, in their words, because it considers the "thinking" that goes on in writing. They argue that writing has "three major elements": " the task environment, the writer's long-term memory, and the writing processes" (277). A diagram of the model can be reviewed on p. 278 of _Cross-Talk_.

A writing situation is always governed by a "rhetorical problem" (279). This is, essentially, the assigned writing task. In the case of the protocol analysis they feature, the task is an English professor being asked to write about his job to an audience of teenage girls who read _Seventeen_ magazine. His task is how to solve the problem of what to say to this audience.

In doing so, he has to draw on his long-term memory to figure out how to approach the topic. What does he know about teenage girls? What does he know about _Seventeen_ magazine? What can he say about his job that will be of interest to this group? How can he get their attention?

He begins planning, going back and forth between the rhetorical problem he faces and modifying his understanding of it. He generates ideas from long-term memory and begins to try to organize his long-term memories and set and reset his goals for the writing task. The goals he sets for himself are self-created. These goals are "generated, developed and revised by the same processes that generate and organize new ideas" (281). He tries to translate his ideas into symbols, he reviews and evaluates those ideas, and he monitors his process. In other words, the processes are not linear, we do not "march through these processes in a simple 1, 2, 3 order" (284). We move around in these thinking processes: "First, as our model of the writing process describes, the processes of generating and evaluating appear ot have the power to interrupt the writer's process at any point--and they frequently do. This means that new knowledge and/or some feature of the current text can interrupt the process at any time through the process of generating and evaluating. This allows a flexible collaboration among goals, knowledge, and texts" (289). This is a pretty dynamic model. It is epistemic, too: "In the act of writing, people regenerate or recreate their own goals in light of what they learn" (290).

The rest of the essay goes on to discuss the protocol of the professor composing an essay for his teenage audience. I've already talked about this on Tanya's blog, to some extent, but I do want to comment that the discussion/description of the cognitive process model dominates the article, and the protocol itself takes a backseat. The rhetorical choice to explain the model largely in isolation from the example or examples (I've actually cheated and tried to bring the two together) can be useful, but it has the effect here of making the protocol look like an after-thought, and there is a lot that is so interesting in this protocol: how the writer constructs an image and view of young girls, how he tries to think through how to represent his work, how he imagines _Seventeen_ magazine.

I can see how the model operates with and explains the professor's thinking processes, but what it does not account for are his cultural assumptions and biases that make it possible for him to address, or not, his audience. This is where Bizzell's article "Cognition, Convention, and Certainty" ((1982) comes into play as a useful corrective. I quote them at length: "The Flower-Hayes model consistently presents a description of how the writing process goes on as if it were capable of answering questions about why the writer makes certain choices in certain situations. While it is useful for us to have an overview of the 'how' such as the Flower-Hayes model offers, we should not suppose that this will enable us to advise students on difficult questions of practice. To put it another way, if we are going to see students as problem-solvers, we must also see them as problem-solvers situated in DISCOURSE COMMMUNITIES [my emphasis] that guide problem definition and the range of alternative solutions" (395). This explains some of the professor's struggles with trying to address the teen girls. He is struggling with how to frame his discourse for his audience; he is struggling with (and, I would argue, hampered by) gender-based assumptions. I'd like to see what he wrote, wouldn't you? (or maybe not)

The Flower-Hayes model is interesting to me--yes, interesting upon a distance of 25 years. The attempt to understand complex thinking processes in composing seems important, and later work on cognition bridges some of the gaps, accounting for some of the points I raise above and others such as culture, the environment, the role of emotions on cognition.

Yet "play up sex" (p. 295) remains one of the truly memorable lines in early composition protocol analysis. It is, unfortunately, all too familiar of a line. Play up sex to teenage girls (implied that it will get their interest), he says, and then the researcher notes "Yet it was instructive to note that once this new plan was represented in language--subjected to the acid test of prose--it too failed to pass, because it violated some of his tacit goals or criteria for an acceptable prose style" (295). How about this? HE SOUNDED A BIT LIKE A LECHEROUS IDIOT (PLAY UP SEX TO UNDERAGE MINORS), so he had a laugh at himself( we hope), and he skipped along to his next great idea.

Unfair, I know, but these moments need to be marked. The "model" takes care of the prof's remark (and the remark about girls liking English cuz its tidy) or does it?

My question: In addition to all this model allows for, how does protocol analysis (allow or not) and this model of cognitive process allow for assessment of cultural assumptions and biases?

Gallaudet and Kinneavy

Keep your eyes on Gallaudet University where the students have barricaded themselves in the administration building to protest the incoming president of the university. Both faculty and students are protesting the Board's selection of her for a number of reasons that relate to questions about her effectiveness and her fitness for the position. She is to be the second deaf president in the history of the university, but she did not learn ASL until she was in her twenties. Some of the coverage refers to her as the "third choice candidate" of the faculty and students. Today's coverage is all over the place: _Inside Higher Ed_ and on NPR and other major venues. There is a complicated history of protest at Gallaudet over the selection of leaders.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/09/gallaudet

While reading the coverage today, I ran across an article written by a student journalist that addressed how students at Gallaudet and elsewhere must have "too much time on their hands" or "too much time between classes" if they are protesting. Protesting is something that college students outgrow said this notable student journalistic sage.

Now what does this have to do with Kinneavy? Well, Kinneavy is worried, too, about what he deems students' "unorthodox and extreme forms of deviant self-expression" (137). Keep in mind that he published this article in 1969 when things were really heating up with the SDS and with anti-Vietnam protests and with civil rights and feminism. He may have other contexts in mind like the demand for education to be relevant. I'm not exactly sure. But instead of looking to the larger social forces as the main explanatory narrative for the students' self-expression, Kinneavy has an interesting theory about why these "deviant self-expressions" are taking place:

"At the college level, in English departments during the period immediately preceding the present, the restriction of composition to expository writing and the reading of literay texts had had two equally dangerous consequences. First, the neglect of expressionism, as a reaction to progressive education, has stifled self-expression in the student and partially, at least, is a cause of the unorthodox and extreme forms of deviant self-expression now indulged in by college students on many campuses today" (137).

This is a really interesting assertion, on some level. English departments neglecting expressive discourse means that students are busting out all over the place with demands for modes of expression. Happenings, sit-ins, consciousness raising groups, political meetings by leftist and civil rights groups and anti-war protestors. Now that is an interesting perspective as it tries to put the English dept. at the center of maelstrom of political and expressive activity. If English would do more to help these students express themselves (if the English dept. would act as an outlet and a regulating force), they (the students) might not resort to such extreme measures. I really want to know more about what Kinneavy was actually reacting to, specifically.

Kinneavy ends with a plea for a "preservation of the liberal arts tradition with composition as a foundation stone" and with a very reasonable assertion that "'[i]t is to the good of each of the aims of discourse to be studied in conjunction with others" (138).

Kinneavy was looking for a way to balance out the study of discourse and a way to refigure English depts. I hear a frustration and anger in this piece at the end that I found fascinating. I don't agree with his interpretation of what was happening with student self-expression (lack of expressive discourse made them "resort" to other outlets), but I appreciate that he saw English depts. as a place that might make a difference for students.

Berlin echoes an aspect of this theme of the importance of teaching discourse when he argues in "Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories" that in "teaching writing we are tacitly teaching a version of reality and the student's place and mode of operation in it" (257). If we see our task as mechanistic, imparting the rules (which Hartwell critiques, too), we fail to realize that we are "given a responsibility that far exceeds this merely instrumental task" (257). Here's another quotation from Berlin:

"We are teaching a way of experiencing the world, a way of ordering and making sense of it" ( Berlin 268). Our notions of what happens with writing relate to our theories of language and rhetoric that inform that work. What are those theories? When we try to answer those questions, do we come out with a mish-mash of maxims of do we really answer the question: How does language work? How do our theories of language directly influence the ways we teach writing? Yes, these are basic questions, but have we answered them satisfactorily?

D'Angelo and Empire

I have been reading around in the 601 blogs tonight, and one particular thread caught my attention: the one that Terri and Trish are pursuing on their blogs about D'Angelo's article. I posted a response to Trish's blog that I'll take a bit further (and I excerpt it below, too) What got me worked up in the D'Angelo piece was the theory of rhetoric that was linked to his meditation on consciousness and composing. There is a universalist notion of rhetoric behind this. I'll repeat the line from his essay: “The function of rhetoric, therefore, is to guide individuals who are distinct and separate toward greater unity and identification of purpose and action” (D'Angelo 148).

This is interesting statement in a time of global empire, globalization, and war. It is interesting in relation to the repeated cycles of genocide in the 20th/21st century (see my entry on the Armenian genocide). It is interesting statement in light of continued interest and commitment to human rights discourses in the face of repeated denials and travesties committed against human rights. I am speaking of large trends and patterns, but I think we have to think big if we are to take on D'Angelo's big statement about rhetoric's function. I want to test it not only in its own context (1978 and a time when composition studies is forming research paradigms and professionalizing), but I want to test it against our times and also against its own times. In D'Angelo's case it was the Cold War, continued after-shocks of the Nixon Presidency, Carter in office, the Iran Hostage "crisis," feminism, putting into practice key civil rights legislation, higher education contraction and expansion at the same time. So a desire for unity and universalism in a Western framework, but that framework fragments and breaks up into ruins as we move further toward the end of the 20th century with the fall of the Soviet Empire and the emergence of the U.S. as the sole global superpower,

So there are interesting tensions here: a tension between a universalist and unifying notion of rhetoric and a world that is increasingly fragmented by economic disparities, war, genocide, preventable epidemics (preventable if there is political and economic will). This is, I guess, my "dark" blog post. I prefer a rhetoric of solidarity across differences rather than a rhetoric of unity. This aligns me with the discussion of the "new rhetoric" and "social epistemic rhetoric" that is being discussed on Tanya's blog.




FROM MY POST to Trish:

Your ruminations are useful here, Trish. It is useful also to think of how the field of neuroscience reframes many of the issues that D’Angelo raises. What does current brain research show that supports and defeats these arguments?

I think at base here is also a question about what D’Angelo thinks rhetoric is for, and this fits in with his views of mind. He argues that the goal for evolution if “hothing less than universal convergence” (148). Rhetoric must also move toward universal convergence: “The function of rhetoric, therefore, is to guide individuals who are distinct and separate toward greater unity and identification of purpose and action” (148). That sounds pretty good if you are a universalist and you want to talk about mankind as a universal category, but is it really the case? Isn’t rhetoric’s purpose to also create division? To separate and name differences, create identification with some groups and division with others? I’m thinking of Burke here and thinking of contemporary politics in the U.S. and on the global stage. A “rhetoric of Empire” could be that universal impulse–do we want that?

Quoting Teilhard, D’Angelo argues that “the men (yes, men) of the future will form, in some way, but one single consciousness” (148). This is the dream of a greater humanity united by a set of values and a common consciousness. Yet we can see that we are so far from that right now that a statement like that seems like a strange note in a bottle that has floated in from a distant shore.

Recognizing that he can accused of evolutionary determinism, D’Angelo quickly defends by noting that free choice is possible. But isn’t choice conditioned by economics, politics, social contexts, etc? I go back to the mid-section of the article and think that he needs to stick to some of Neumann’s insights about the egocentricity of “mankind.” The assertion of the will of the few on the wills of the many. This is not what Neumann said exactly, but he seems to have a bleaker view that I find appealing given D’Angelo’s tendency to wax universal.

These week's 601 readings present quite a grab-bag of possibilities for discussion: Hartwell on grammar, Kinneavy on theories of discourse, Braddock on the topic sentence, D'Angelo on a psychological theory of the composing process, and Berlin on theories of contemporary composition. This is all in the segment that Villaneuva refers to as "discourse." We didn't read all the essays in this segment, rather we sampled some of them. The class members are blogging individual notes for select figures, so I'll jump in and comments on the set up of this conversation in _Cross-Talk_.

As Villaneuva argues, all of the essays are "concerened with matters of mind: ontology, epistemology, psychology" (127). He reminds us that these questions go back to the second book of Aristotle, "which provides a psychology of audiences" (127). He also reminds us that we need to remember that 18th c. rhetorician George Campbell and 19th c. rhetorician Alexander Bain turned to psychology to "explain the processes involved in rhetorical acts" (127). The picture would not be complete without Kenneth Burke, either, who considered symbolic action in relation to the "new sciences" of which psychology is one (127).

What I think is interesting about this section in _Cross-Talk_ is that it is very grab-bag. I'm not sure it is a coherent section in the book, and I don't yet have a fully worked through explanation of why I feel this is so. I'll work on it. I agree that pyschology is major cross-theme across the essays, but moreso in some pieces that in others. What does hold the chapter together across the essays is Villaneuva's argument that the a number of the essays tend to "look to the parts of discourse in order to understand the whole more readily" (128). What I'm interested in, too, is the methodological differences across the essays: how the object of study is framed, what the controls and constraints are within each essay. More on that later.

On Laura's blog, I commented on my sense that Braddock left out questions of genre and the major differences between a journalistic essay for a major publication vs. student essays. It seems reasonable that genre and audience are the major factors here in determining whether or not such pieces have topic sentences, yet that issue is largely omitted. This goes back to the way the study was defined to isolate and discuss a particular feature of prose: the topic sentence. It seems to me one of the challenges this segment of readings poses is how to study language as a whole vs. how to study constituent parts of language such as sentences. What do we find from looking at the part vs. the whole? This is a productive tension throughout all the pieces in this section, and it is one I'd like to talk more about in class.

Pig Farm Could Sell for 75 Million

Those of you who know me know that I occasionally rant or write about agriculture on this blog. I'm working on a book that addresses the public rhetorics of agriculture, so I constantly watch the news for stories about the ag world.

Well, this one was out through the Associated Press. It hit the Syracuse paper, too. This one is about a pig farmer in Las Vegas who is being offered 75 million for his land so that homes can be built on his farmland. This is a common enough story: farmland sold off to developers, yet it has some interesting twists and turns. The money alone is astounding.

North Las Vegas has grown up around this farmer's swine operation (he raises 3,500 pigs). The folks in their nice air-conditioned homes with their patios and watered lawns really don't like the smell of the swine barns wafting across their subdivisions. Now these folks probably like their bacon, pork chops, pork tenderloin, and barbequed pork as much as the rest of the world. but they probably reason that their pork is not supposed to be rolling around in their neighborhood. Pork is supposed to be in vaccumed sealed packages in the local supermarket. Never mind how it gets raised--just NIMBY (NOT IN MY BACKYARD).

I can tell you from experience (yes, I did help raise a couple of pigs in my farm days) that pigs do smell. But so do cows, chickens, and all other domestic farm animals. 3,500 animals--well, you can imagine what the manure yields are on a daily basis.

Guess what--this intrepid farmer does NOT want to sell. He wants people in the neighborhood to see his farm as a public good, not as public nuisance! He feeds his pigs recycled food from the local casinos, so he actually has an environmental argument for remaining on the land: he's performing a public service of feeding people and actually helping the environment.

There's a lot to say about this story--the beleagured farmer, the greedy developers, the lack of zoning and city planning, the environmental angle (feeding pigs recycled casino food). Even though I want to root for this farmer and I am rooting for him to stay and defy the development of his land, he's running a factory farm, essentially. Yes, it's a family farm, but the size of the operation makes it a CAFO and along with that do come real environmental concerns about the release of ammonia, manure lagoons, etc. We don't get details about how he runs his operation, but an operation that size is usually always highly industrialized (antibiotics, huge confinement sheds, manure lagoons or pits).

So how does one read this story? David (the little guy) fighting Goliath (the developers)? The yeoman farmer making his stand? The industrialized farmer fighting suburban sprawl?
The durn fool who won't take the money and get on to Florida?

See the story at

http://uk.biz.yahoo.com/060925/323/gn11x.html

Is Post-Process theory a floating signifier, too?

I'm enjoying Lisa Ede's wide-ranging reading of the post-process movement.I think her read of the professionalization of composition studies is an important chapter in understanding process theories of composing. In fact, I find this to be the strongest segment of Part II and, in some ways, of the whole book. I like the way she unfolds a discussion of the "crisis rhetoric" that spurred universities to hire composition faculty, the need for employment that literature Ph.D.s felt, the use of social science oriented research as a way to prove that the field had a "method" and "strategies" for solving the literacy crisis. One thing I wondered about as I read along for a second time was what role open admissions played in all of this. She does mention Shaughnessy, but the democratization of higher education and affirmative action was a major factor here, and I wondered why we didn't hear more about that.

I think Ede makes a very strong point about post-process theory but is she also making the same kind of move with post-process theory that she says post-process folks are making with process theories, what she calls the writing process movement (63)? She has pointed to a range of texts that identify our historical and epistemological "turn" to post-process theory (Reither, Cooper, Kent, Dobrin, Crowley, Faigley, Harris, etc). But we don't get detailed readings of these texts. She points out that these texts tend to see process theories in limited "floating signifier" ways. I worry that post-process theory is also becoming a floating signifier in Ede's text. That doesn't mean that I don't see her text doing important work--it is. But what about the differences across these texts? She does treat those differences in small detail, but I guess I want to see a fuller reading across those texts. Has someone done that already? I want to understand how the post-process theory conversation evolved in more detail and why it evolved for specific material reasons beyond the professionalization argument. What about postmodernism, poststructuralism, revisions of liberal feminisms, critical race theory, and globalization?

While Ede is focused on process and post-process, other scholars have articulated the debate as one of expressivism vs. social constructionism.

A few years ago when I taught Thomas Kent's edited collection on post-process theory in CCR 601, I invited my colleague Jim Zebroski to come and talk about his views on post-process theory and on the ways that the process movement has been discussed and addressed in our composition histories. He gave a great talk, and some of the ideas he shared with us are in his essay entitled "The Expressivist Menace" in the edited collection by Rosner et al _History, Reflection, and Narrative: The Professionalization of Composition, 1963-1983_ (Ablex, 1999) This is an important collection, and Jim does a good job of unpacking the reaction against the "spectre" of expressivism. He looks at empirical evidence for how expressivism has emerged in the field, examining writing practices, teaching practices, curricular practices, disciplinary practices, professional practices, and theorizing practices. Part of the problem with composition histories that make claims about expressivism is that they examine only a narrow range of evidence. Jim's study expands the conversation, and he articulates a useful social formation reading of why we are in the moment of reaction against expressivism. I'll bring in his article to class, and we can talk about his reading of the social formation of particular arguments about expressivism.

Also, I really like Laurie's use of Britton et al to unpack a reading of the "Mind the Gap" assignment in Writing 105. Read her entry if you haven't already at her blog: thoughtjam@wordpress.com.

I have to go read a few more 105 papers before tomorrow morning!

Post-post-process

Tanya and Immy's blog posts on this week's 601 readings have brought up some interesting questions and issues regarding Nancy Sommers' article on student vs. experienced writers revision strategies and the Breuch piece on post-process theory.

I posted some fairly long responses to each of their blog entries, but I want to back-track and pose a few questions and thoughts about each area.


I like the way Immy unpacks the student writer vs. experienced writer dichotomy in Sommers's article. I think that the binaries of experienced vs. inexperienced writers, skilled vs. unskilled writers, basic writer vs. first-year "typical" writers get us into trouble. There were practical reasons to create those categories for the researchers, no doubt, but how do they prohibit a wide angle examination of what actually happens for writers without putting on stigmatizing labels? And what of all the baggage these labels carry? Also, I'm puzzling through the idea of "maturity" in relation to writing? What these analyses bring up, whether directly or indirectly, is the question of age and experience as well as cultural background, mastery of the subject at hand, power relations within institutions, etc. How have we (or have we not) examined the role of age and psychological maturity in these studies? We have been giving Emig a hard time for singling out Lynn, but is her major factor (beyond the past writing archive) the unsual psychological "maturity" and insight of Lynn as a young person? We'd probably say yes. Yes, Lynn is exceptional, beyond her years. She's an unusually "mature" writer compared to the rest, it seems. So we value an ethos of experience, self-reflexivity, and maturity. How to get there?

Tanya's ruminations on Breuch make me think a lot more about what function post-process theory serves. My question is: What role and function does post-process theory really serve as this historical juncture in composition studies? Is it a reactive discourse? A flip-the-script moment, moving toward a paradigm shift? Or is it really a discourse and set of theories that describe the epistemological shifts that are already underway? Anti-foundationalism and post-modern discourses have permeated much of the scholarly work in composition and rhetoric (I'm not so sure these discourses get played out and enacted in the pedagogical arena). How do those discourses really seep into the modernist enterprise of first-year writing instruction? I'm having a Sharon Crowley moment, I guess, as I think about the arguments she makes for abolishing the first-year writing requirement with all its modernist trappings. If we are really going to be post-process, perhaps we need to get rid of first-year writing in the first place and be post-first year writing.

I'm struck, too, how frequently Britton et al reference Emig's study. I have read and reread Britton et al many times, but this time the Emig segments stood out for me. I'll say more about that in another entry because I'm suddenly seized with a lot of fatigue and I'm actually starting to "nod off" at the keyboard. I've read too many 105 papers today--more to read tomorrrow, too. I'm not feeling very post-process tonight!

Remind me to post the recipe for squash and apple soup that I made this evening It's definitely steeped in process theory: all that chopping and blending, how could it not be?

Black Dog of Fate

At the Nottingham Senior Living Community (in Jamesville, NY) where I run a writing group for the residents, Professor Peter Balakian (Colgate University) visited us and gave a talk on his memoir _Black Dog of Fate_ (1998), a story of growing up in America and gaining a growing awareness of how the Armenian genocide affected his family. He characterized his memoir as addressing and coming to terms with the transmission of intergenerational trauma. His grandmother was a survivor of a forced death march in Turkey in 1915 (part of the killing of over a million Armenians by the Turkish government). She survived and her two daughters survived, but everyone else in her family perished by murder or starvation. Balakian's story addresses the silences in his family about the massacres and the decoding of meanings that unfolded for him over time. In his twenties, he started to read about the genocide, then he began to write about it later in life, and then to lecture and teach about it.

Dr. Balakian's presentation was extremely powerful: as a historical overview of the genocide, the reasons for it being forgotten or denied, but also as a story of coming to terms with it as a second generation after the survivor generation.

I'm sure we'll be reading Dr. Balakian's memoir in the writing group. We all wanted to run out to purchase it.

Mired in Case Study

Reading Janet Emig the distance of thirty five years, I can't help but wonder about the reach of case study. Tanya's question/response to Laura's blog has prompted my late night musings when I should be planning my 105 class instead of yammering on my blog.

Case study writing research may seem like a quaint method to us at the distance of thirty-five years, but it's really not. Case study is still a bread and butter approach in social science research, and, in some ways, in writing research as well. Case studies are the stuff of popular psychology books, too; we're raised on the stuff. Case study is the basis for comparison, for theorizing about applications, for understanding concrete details of limited cases. Case study is currently used quite a bit in writing program administration research: a program is studied as a model for others to think about and theorize about and work for/against. Syracuse's writing program gets used/cited in this way frequently: our program is a model for other ind. writing programs or ones that are striking out to become independent.

Of course, case study is full of problems: reliability, generalizability, bias, you name it.

Yet think of case study in practical terms. Case study is a way to deal with all the giant problems of trying to do a wide-scale study. Let's face it, time and resources are limited. Case study is a way to try to understand a complex set of circumstances in real and concrete ways. Case study can be exploratory, reflective, and a way to examine patterns.

Yet let's face it: Emig's study had a lot of artificial components. What would it have been like to do a case study of the students negotiating their "real writing demands" in the high school classroom vs. researcher-imposed ones? It's easy to pick holes and think about gaps. In fact, Emig herself points out a lot of the gaps and is willing to be reflexive.

Well, some might say, we're post-process now. We don't need to go back and try to re-do this research or revisit it. This is just an interesting artifact. Well, it is, and it isn't. How people make meaning in writing still involves their processes of making meaning. What has perhaps changed is the idea/hope/belief that we can find the right way to intervene in those processes. But what seems to still be operative is the idea that those processes are often individualized with some collective components and yet adapted to different contexts.

More tomorrow...

Composing as a Given

Terri and Laurie, you have made me a happy blogger! Thanks for posting--finally, eastcoast-westcoast has some traffic.

Terri, since you know _Cross-talk_, I hope you'll talk with us more about what works and what doesn't about the book. I was intrigued about your story about your presentation. I've taught using the book three times now, and each time I find new resources/new points of view that I did not deploy in past versions of the course, so I contine to find this a good resource.

Laurie, your question about "process" being a given is useful to me, and it's useful to think about what other terms we might substitute for its primacy. "Primacy"--there it is, and Royster and Williams would remind us to question and critique primacy. What does making "process" a given provide (or not)? Is process the given? Maybe it is a given term, but is it a given practice that is theoretically informed? The histories we read the last couple of weeks would dub "freshman English" the given in the conversation. So what would Cross-talk look like if the book began with the histories of composition and rhetoric? We wouldn't be getting modern composition studies, but a more historically focused initial take on composition studies. The other given in the histories is the idea of "current traditional rhetoric," which was assumed to be the main theory of rhetoric and writing guiding composition pedagogies via textbooks and classroom instruction.

I think that beginning with the histories means that we know that process was around before--think of the progressive era with John Dewey as a focus and Fred Newton Scott. What I want to understand is why process was so important. What cultural and social influences urged us to process?

I have more to say about that, but I have to get Autumn to daycare and eat breakfast. Ah, the necessities of material life.

Laurie, I hope you didn't delete the line about putting Cross-talk in there with your cookbooks!

Cooking and Composing?

What is about writing and writing research that makes people want to talk about "cooking"? Are we in the feminized composition kitchen?

Peter Elbow once famously likened writing to cooking. Victor Villaneuva begins the "Preface to the First Edition" of _Cross-talk_ with a discussion of making healthy pancakes for his children. I know Victor knows how to cook because he has moonlighted as a short order cook to supplement his once-inadequate professor's salary when he was at Northern Arizona University. He talks about this in his book _Bootstraps_. In the Preface to _Cross-talk_the egg added the touch of leavening needed for the pancake, and Villaneuva modified his cooking process, adjusting it to a more successful result. He did so because he had an "understanding of how eggs work in cooking." He "understood the theory." But many of us who teach writing don't understand the theory. We're busy mixing and matching theories with wild abandon, so that we end up in interview rooms, saying that we are Marxists who align ourselves with Peter Elbow and Ken Bruffee (xiv). We end up not being able to navigate composition's "currents," as Villaneuva puts it. _Cross-talk_ is intended as a guide for those us who teach graduate courses in comp theory, those of us who take those courses, and those of us who have taught comp for a long time and want a refresher (xiv). The book is dedicated to Sam and Tom, two graduate students, and all other graduate students, the users of the book, who have commented on the book's inner workings and logic.

To get back to the pancake/cooking metaphor, through reading this book, we "should be able to come up with quite the pancake recipe, something you [we] can swallow" (xiv).

We get a perspective in this volume, but we don't get a single-point of view. Villaneuva lets us know all the things he has left out in the first edition and all the things he added to address those omissions in the second edition. We get the "Son of Cross-Talk" (hey Victor, what about "Daughter" of Cross-Talk") who has more to say about writers of color, feminists, technology studies, and service learning among others.

I think this is a damn good book, a very useful overview without a lot of apparatus bells and whistles. The sections are set up around the conversation metaphor, with the idea of talk anchoring all of the segments.

The Givens in Our Conversations: The Writing Process
Talking in Terms of Discourse
Scientific Talk: Developmental Schemas
Talking about Writing in Society
Talking about Selves and Schools: Voice, Voices, and Other Voices
Continuing the Conversation

These are broad rubrics with diverse essays housed within. The conversation begins with writing process, which locates composition history in the mid-twentieth century instead of the 19th century or earlier. This locates the reader more in our current historical moment--modern comp studies.

The "given" in the conversation is the writing process. I don't know if it is still the given. Perhaps it functions as the "given" to react against now with the "post-process" movement? But here goes to try to give an overview of the Villanueva overview. In short, the writing process history is narrated briefly and succinctly:

1959: "the National Academy of Sciences sponsored the Woods Hole Conference" with Jerome Bruner at the helm. There was a shift "for all schooling to a process of cognitive development. 'Process' became the new catchword" (1).

1963: Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer call for research on writing (not just product or pedagogy) itself in their book _Research in Written Composition_.

1966: The Dartmouth Conference where "fifty teachers of English from England and the United States met to discuss common problems" (1). The Yanks discovered that the Brits taught writing as "individual development, a matter of self-discovery" (1).

1971: Janet Emig answers the "call" issued by Braddock et al by studying the composing processes of eight twelfth graders.

We're reading Emig's call this week and blogging the chapters, but there were other calls as well: Perl, Murray, Sommers, Lunsford and Ede, Kaustman Breuch, even Ong (?). Where's Elbow?

But what is the backdrop for this interest in process?

Politics?
Social movements?
Art and literature?

Here is a quick speculation: The U.N. with a focus on negotiating and international responsibility for global affairs. The process of global diplomacy.
Civil rights, feminism, gay rights, human rights: all have highly process-oriented components
Art and literature, the avant garde, experimental film, stream of consciousness in fiction, etc
Progressive educational theory stemming from John Dewey's idea of "experience as education" and even earlier notions
Psychological theories that emphasize process-oriented therapies and theories

I think there is much more to say about why process is a "given."

Tom has just informed me is turning off the power to fix an outlet, so I must sign off now as I have no computer battery (it has been recalled).

Feminizing

The discussion thread on Laura's blog revolutionlullabye about women's status in academe is useful. Laurie posted a great comment about National Labor Bureau stats and about the AAUP Report on the Status of Women. Much of what is said in that report augments/affirms Sue Ellen Holbrook's insights about women's publication records in "Women's Work: The Feminizing of Composition." Holbrook offers this rather grim observation:

"Saturated by women practitioners, focused on pedagogy, allied with education departments and school teaching, conceived as having a 'service' and elementary place in the curriculum, and pervaded by paraprofessionalism, composition has become women's work. And so it will remain--disproportionately the work of women and work of lesser value--as long as these conditions remain" (Holbrook 211).

Holbrook is right that all of these factors have come into play to create a "feminized field," but there is the larger question of what this means. She goes on to remark:

"The transformation of composition from women's work to an esteemed profession can come only as part of the larger complex processes of raising the status of taching itself and the other service occupations in a capitalist society, breaking down the sexual division of labor, achieving social and economic equity between women and men, and revalorizing socially produced differences between the masculine and feminine genders" (211).

That statement gives us some hope, and she does point toward the presence of feminists in composition studies. Theresa Enos's book _Gender Roles in Faculty Lives in Rhetoric and Composition (SIUP, 1996) and my book _Gypsy Academics and Mother-teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction_ (Boynton/Cook-Heinemann, 1998) strive to shed light on the situation in the late 90s for women faculty in composition studies. I argued in my book that faculty unionism was a way to combat the poor pay and working conditions of part-time and non-tenure-line faculty, in particular. However, there is also the question of how women in senior ranks in composition--and there are a number of us now--are making a difference in how composition as work gets valued. I think that an updated survey article needs to be written about women's presence/status in composition. There is a book underway on the topic. Diane Davis, Michelle Ballif, and Roxanne Mountford have been working on a book about Women's Ways of Making it in composition and have conducted interviews with successful, tenured women scholars. I'm not sure of their argument, overall, but I think the question of how women have made a difference in addressing workplace inequities and feminization might be on the table. There is also a CCCC Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession, which takes up these issues.

Yet we should overlay some globalized concepts onto this issue/ essay since we're reading Holbrook now in 2006.

"Service" occupations are often devalued MORE in a globalized society. When there are unionized populations of "care workers" or those in the "helping professions," wages and benefits will be better. Collective bargaining can improve working conditions in significant ways for some groups of caring workers: teachers, nurses, contingent faculty in higher ed. , clerical workers (accounting for differences between groups). Social movement unionism present in groups like Jobs for Justice and United Students Against Sweatshops are indications of the kind of melding that can happen between social justice movements and labor organizations. But this is in the West, often in highly developed, capitalist countries. There is now the globalization-feminization of labor.

Care work (nannies and elder care work) and pink collar clerical work are new frontiers in globalization. Nannies and elder care workers are brought in and clerical work and factory work is outsourced to other parts of the globe where workers (mainly women) are not organized into unions. This work has gendered and racialized dimensions as many of these workers are people of color, women of color. There is even more opportunity for exploitation when there is a highly exploitable class of workers (usually young women from developing countries). So we are in an uneven space with improvements of the status and working conditions of those who perform caring work. The book _The Globalized Woman_ deals with many of these issues.


Also to get back to our immediate disciplinary context, there is also the question of instituionalized racism that Royster and Williams mention. Our field has, for many years, ignored the histories and literacy practices of African Americans, equating African American students with the position of basic writing students. This is also the case with other people of color, Latinos/as and Native American students who also have been grouped in the basic writing rubric. Asian American students have been typed as ESL students or as model minorities. So clearly there is work to be done to re-direct the gaze of the field and redress the gender inequities and instituionalized racism, which are intertwined and intersected in ways we haven't yet begun to discuss in the field.

Scatterings on Comp Histories: Where are we going, Where have we been?

I have a lot going through my head tonight, and I know I won't get this into one single blog post. First off, the whole weekend was interrupted wireless service. Our router went out, so I haven't had a chance to blog since Friday. I must admit, that I've missed it! So I'm catching up now!

Tonight I've been reading blog posts from the 601 class, and I'll try to work on some gleanings plus some thoughts I've had as I've worked on this week's readings.

First, I've been thinking about the question I posted last week: "Why Harvard?" That question has been turned around in my mind to "Why not Howard University? Why not Oberlin? Why not the female academies that Holbrook might call our attention to" Well, the answer might be that Harvard is the "oldest" and most "prestigious" institution, they had the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric, and they had the long and illustrious history of testing/placing people into freshman English. Harvard is the "trendsetter," and other institutons follow suit. But Royster and Williams raise doubts about that. Were HBCUs imitating Harvard? Were co-educational institutions like Oberlin imitating Harvard? Maybe in some ways, but probably not as much as one might think, given the "Harvard-centric" model of our composition histories These instituions had specific missions tied to their student populations, to their pursuit of certain models of education, and to their affiliations with particular kinds of civic literacies. So we have a serious "primacy" flaw (to paraphrase Royster and Williams) in many of our composition and rhetoric histories.


Trish asked about Berlin's characterization of University of Denver, and I'd like to talk more about that. How to account for the history of a program in a few pages in a larger history without resorting to a quick sketch model that will simplify the complexity of a program? Trish's questions also made me think about the role of extra-institutional history in relation to institutional histories? How have our histories of the field portrayed a deep understanding (or not) of outside forces impinging upon the academy?

Also, what about Tanya' s question, paraphrased: "What has really changed?" Are we stuck in the overwork, underpay, lack of respect version of the field? What about the double-meaning of feminization? How far have we really come? I think that's an important question because in some ways, we've come really far--this Ph.D. program and your/our presence in it is proof of that. But then there are the teaching conditions of the majority of many writing faculty who work off the tenure-track. We need to account for that in relation to any sort of progress narrative of the field.

Immy asked an interesting question in her blog about the end of Royster and Williams, essay, and I'd like us to pursue that further in class.

I liked Laurie's question about Berlin writing 1985-2006.? What would he say about that period? How would he build on his categories at the end of the book or would he have exploded them? Stewart faintly criticized Berlin in the preface to _Rhetoric and Reality_ for putting things in boxes. What "boxes" would we create to characterize 1985-2006? Would we resist the primacy that Williams and Royster decry?

I've got more to say, but I have to put a four year old to bed. I'll log on again because I'd like to say more about the blog posts and about our readings. See ya!

Conferencing, and why do you teach writing?

I had conferences with my 105 students this week on Thursday and Friday. We discussed their drafts-in-progress about the novel _The Kite Runner_. Inevitably, though, we talked about other topics even though the bulk of the discussion focused on their drafts: developing their claims, evidence paragraphs, sentences, etc. Here are the top "around the edges of the writing conference" topics that came up this week:.

--about the fact one student had not done laundry in three weeks. I admitted that I hadn't done laundry in about 10 days--so watch out for some weird outfits.
--about eating habits: One of my students brought his breakfast to our conference: Gatorade and chips. I must admit, I was envious. It looked pretty good to me, and I had just come from the gym!
--about the fact my grandmother went to Occidental College--don't ask me how it came up. I'm sure the student who heard that factoid was not even faintly impressed. I forgot to mention that my grandmother dropped out her sophomore year to get married. Maybe I can bring that up at the next conference.
--about a student going home to visit family (this student was radiant)! I want to go home, too!
--about another student's athletic travel schedule and what it was like to juggle being a student-athlete these first few weeks.
--about my 105 class last fall. Two of my former 105 students rushed into my office while I was talking to a current 105 student and introduced themselves to the current student and shook his hand. They proceeded to take over the conference I was having with my current student, and we began reminiscing about last fall's class and the lives of the past 105 students. The current student looked on with amusement, or at least I hope it was amusement. Interesting situation....the past meets the present.

There are more stories, but I'm running out of energy here...here's the finale.

A student was talking with me about a teacher in high school who didn't like to teach writing. I remarked that it's hard to teach writing and that many people don't like to do it because they find it time-consuming and difficult (the "Overwork" theme from all the 601 readings). "Why do you do it?" the student shot back. It was one of the those questions that I think I always have an answer to, but it got me for a few seconds. I said something lame about how much I love language (true), reading, and writing (all true), but I also said that I thought I was good at it. The student nodded. At least I wasn't contradicted about that last statement --yet......

Anyway....

Rhetoric and Reality: questions and stories

This week’s readings in 601 include the first half of Berlin’s book and also essays/chapters by Sharon Crowley, Bob Connors, and John Brereton. All three fit in nicely with Berlin’s book, but they provide different perspectives, remixes, or departures from Berlin’s overview. A thread I’m trying to pull through is about the histories, theories and practices behind modern composition, but also questions about how history gets written (historiography). Why have we told these stories they way we’ve told them? What are our historical narratives and their major plots (what Hayden White would call modes of emplotment)?

Why do we locate Harvard as the originary narrative? Harvard is all over the place. What are the costs and benefits of telling the Harvard story as one of our main stories?

What is the difference between writing a history of the discipline that is based on the rise of the freshman English course vs. a history that accounts for changing literacy practices and the changing demands of literacy (whether academic literacy or other types of literacies)?

Labor is a central theme in the readings. How is the status of the field related to the status of those who labor in the fields of “freshman English”? What are the major narratives about labor and composition and rhetoric’s status? How do those narratives create a particular psychology and set of moral and ethical claims for the field? What might be the other narratives about labor and status that are currently missing? Where might we look to find those narratives?

Which brings me to another question: What counts as evidence in these histories? What are the major sources drawn upon?

It's hard to not see the "great man" theory operating in these histories, a veritable who's who of white male faculty figures. While there is no refuting that the university was a male dominated place until of late, how can one rethink the locations and spaces of the history of the field to better account for gender and race? (next week's readings will help us do that, too).

Since we are reading _Rhetoric and Reality_, I will share a story.

Rhetoric and Reality: Meeting Jim

James Berlin came on the greyhound bus from West Lafayette to visit the graduate program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in February of 1993. It was six years after he published Rhetoric and Reality, and he came to give a talk about a new book he was writing on cultural studies and composition. We were happy to hear about Jim’s newer work, but what we all wanted to talk about was Rhetoric and Reality. My fellow graduate students and I had read Rhetoric and Reality many times over. It was and still is a sheer rock cliff of a history that we scaled in our seminars, feeling a sense of triumph after we’d mastered (or tried to master) the parade of dates, names, institutions, and categories. We simply referred to the book by the author: “Berlin.” I’ve been rereading “Berlin,” someone would intone, and he… “ Or in a seminar someone would say, “Berlin argues that….” Everyone would pause. Rhetoric and Reality carried weight with us. It was on everyone’s exam list and dissertation bibliography.

As is the case when any personage visits a graduate program, we steeled ourselves for what we might expect. Would Jim be stuffy? Tweedy? Pompous? Angry? Polemical? Condescending? Touchy-feely (nah, we knew he wouldn’t be that). Would he diss us? I was excited because Jim and I shared a passion for Marxist theories. Granted, I was more interested in socialist feminisms and materialist feminisms, but I felt a kindredship with his orientation toward historical materialism.

We quickly saw that Jim was disciplined and passionate about ideas, but easy going. A real person. His visit to Milwaukee included a lot of visits to restaurants and smoky bars with graduate students and assorted faculty. He was fun to be around. He wasn’t serious or stuffy; he joked a lot, and I gave him a hard time for telling a sexist joke one night. He was gracious about getting a feminist upbraiding. I liked him even more. We talked about Maxine Hairston’s critique of his work in her infamous essay “Diversity and Ideology.” He seemed truly hurt by Maxine’s characterization of his work.

Jim ran while visiting us in Milwaukee, making his way through the icy streets near Lake Michigan. I was impressed that he ran 5 miles almost everyday, especially in the midst of a Midwest winter.

Running, taking the Greyhound, hanging out in smoky bars. We could relate to him. We were sorry when he got back on the Greyhound and went back to Purdue.

Jim collapsed and had a heart attack about a year after he visited us in Milwaukee. He had just come home after one of his daily runs. At Virginia Tech where I was a new assistant professor, my colleague Mike Fainter came into my office that day and casually mentioned that someone named Jim Berlin had passed away. I was sitting there with a graduate student. I asked Mike if it was true. He said it was and that the news of Jim’s death was on a national listserv.

“Did you know him?” Mike asked.

I couldn’t speak, couldn’t move for a while, but eventually I nodded. The graduate student I was meeting with excused herself, Mike went down the hall to tell other faculty, and my office mate shut the door so I could be alone. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t think any of us who met Jim or were fortunate enough to work with him could believe it. It just didn’t seem possible. Jim had a book to finish, dissertations to direct, conference papers to write and read, graduate students to meet and influence, and many miles to run.

There’s a fun run and pub crawl at CCCC every year in honor of Jim. It’s a good event, a good chance to stretch the legs after being shut away in the carpeted rooms of the Hilton or the Hyatt. After the run, participants gather at a local pub to enjoy a beer and conversation. People often tell Jim stories, and there is a lot of laughter. One of my favorite stories is about Jim writing his conference papers on airplanes. He would emerge from a flight with a yellow legal pad, his paper scrawled in longhand. The paper would always make sense, and he’d be ready to have a good time at the conference, attending sessions and staying up late while others sweated over their papers in their hotel rooms.

For a long time (and arguably still to this day), Jim’s book Rhetoric and Reality defined the conversation about rhetorical history for many of us in the field. After reading Berlin, most of us eventually read Kitzhaber’s dissertation If you read Kitzhaber, you see how indebted Jim is to that initial dissertation project. There have been critiques and revisions of Jim’s thesis in Rhetoric and Reality and different histories produced, but the book is still a standard must read—a good place to start to make sense of how the first-year course developed and how the field developed alongside the course.

Plan 9 from Syracuse, Chasing a Dream

I've got to give a shout to Ryan Dacko, our very own local Syracuse documentary filmmaker/hometown boy, who is running (yes, running) from Syracuse to Hollywood in the hopes of securing a meeting with an unmentioned Hollywood producer. He is also making a documentary about his run across the country. He calls it "Plan 9." Any Ed Wood fan will recognize the reference.

Ryan is chasing his dream, but I think the chase is just as interesting as the dream he has of making it big and getting a movie deal. I'm hooked on reading about his daily mileage (a marathon plus), aches and pains, and passage through small towns and weather systems. Ryan, keep running!

You can read his blog.

http://www.plan9fromsyracuse.com/

Location, Location, Location

A bit of a preface is needed for this entry. I'm starting to blog with my CCR 601 course this semester. We're all establishing individual blogs, and we'll blog our responses to readings, notes, ideas about class projects, etc.

This week we focused on the idea of situating/locating ourselves in relation to composition and rhetoric as a field. We read Part I of Lisa Ede's book _Situating Composition_ , Louise Phelp's encyclopedia entry on "Composition Studies," and the proposal for the start-up of the CCR doctoral program. Location was the main focus of all the readings; how do we locate the field? What are its parameters and spaces and concerns? How do we locate ourselves in those spaces?

Ede’s discussion of location is drawn from feminist theory, namely Adrienne Rich’s important essay (1984) “Notes Toward a Politics of Location,” reprinted in Rich’s Blood, Bread, and Poetry collection. Understanding where the subject is located socially and materially in a body, in place, and time is a hallmark feature of feminist thought. Indeed, Ede discusses transnational feminist theorist Caren Kaplan’s work on location, quoting her as saying on p. 28 that location is “discontinuous, multiply constituted, and traversed by diverse social formations” (Questions 182). Ede goes on to say in her own words that location is “multiply constituted and cannot helpfully be characterized as a single place or identity” (28). Her point is not to say that location is a matter of discussing the local, but it is an inquiry, a “rhetorically and materially grounded effort to think through some issues of scholarly practice in composition” (28).

Ede attempts to “locate” herself and her scholarly practices and institutional life in her opening scenarios and in her careful attention to the ways that specific narratives of composition have “located” the field and us in particular ways. She is interested in questioning and interrogating those “locations.” She cites landmark studies such as Crowley’s Composition in the University and Miller’s Textual Carnivals as those that name where we are and why, but she resists pointing toward those studies as the definitive answer.

What I like here is her careful, painstaking work to try to question what our field is and where we might locate it. In many ways, her point is that we can’t fix the field because where we locate it depends on our own situated discourses, vantage points, interests, institutional histories.


The same kind of fluidity and flux in naming and accounting for composition studies can be found in Phelps’ s encyclopedia entry. I always marvel at the multi-layered accounting for composition studies that happens in this entry. I sense in Phelps’s entry a similar commitment to the idea of location—locating ideas in traditions, in contexts, in competing discourses and tensions across those discourses: “No brief definition can capture the complexity and indeterminacy of composition studies in its current stage of development” (123). Expansion and differentiation.
Phelps notes that we seek to explain and impose order on composition studies by deploying the strategies of dominance, inclusion or pluralism, and dialogue. We try to impose order by mapping, creating dichotomies, defining key concepts, and creating schematic histories (128-29). Much of this course (601) tries to do this work, but, as Phelps points out, privileging multimodality and diversity in approaches—a “radical pluralism_-- is valuable and so is the impulse toward dialogue—keeping open a play of understandings about what composition studies is and where it is going (129).
“There is a growing sense that, in a disciplinarity so unstable, scholars must construct the field anew and must negotiate their constructions continually with those of others to achieve some common (but always evolving) understanding of composition studies” (130). I think this is an apt way of describing what goes on in our graduate program and at professional conferences; the stable ground is the constant inquiry and negotiation. This constant inquiry, though, can make people feel as if the ground is fault-ridden, a virtual peace of Southern California, constantly shifting on its plates.

Phelps works us out of this sense of “cacophony” into a metaphor we can follow: a river with branching streams and tributaries feeding it and a sense of common tensions and distinctive features of composition. Thus we move out of a sense of expanding possibilities and openness to a sense of common features and problems. Phelps is careful to avoid mapping and hierarchizing these tensions and features, though. I’m interested in Phelps’s idea that the American origins of composition studies give it a distinctive character and flavor: the constant reinvention, borrowing, sense of individual choice. I wonder, though, if nationality is as key as it might seem to be. Perhaps a great factor is capitalism, which encourages the social relations of the field as much as nationalism might.

Like Ede, Phelps is interested in interrogating practice. “Like concepts of writing, practice. . . has expanded its reference, becoming a generic term for symbolic activities and for professional and everyday activities that share with rhetoric such features as uncertainty…..”(133). She raises the idea of praxis (133).


The CCR proposal enacts an understanding of the field that is based, in large part, on the idea of situated practices.” There are a lot of echoes in the proposal to Phelps and Ede’s notions of situating and locating oneself in relation to the field. I quote from the proposal at length:

• Characterizing activities, functions, conceptualizations, and modes of teaching and learning written language as culturally and historically specific

The discussion of “cultural rhetoric” together with the concept of “situated practices” indicate a focus in the program on investigating the dynamic, dialectic relations among socially organized language activities, individual language users and events, and their cultural contexts. This theme directs attention to questions like these: how practices interact with (not simply respond to) theory; how local phenomena of discourse (practical instances and accomplishments of writing or talk) connect to global “contexts” (settings, group identities, ideologies, institutions); how writers and texts act upon and constitute contexts as well as being embedded in and shaped by them; and how participants of different cultures perform and understand communication behavior differently, or transport such culture-specific knowledge into intra- or intercultural situations. [25] The curriculum poses such questions pervasively, not only about writing activities but about rhetorical teaching, learning, criticism, and theory itself. This theme is reinforced in part by the requirement for historical perspective, discussed below (section I.C.3.d).

CCR, then, as it was designed was to encourage a situated, contextual, culturally aware understanding of writing, rhetoric, literacy, and communication. I don’t think we always get there, but the program itself pulls through the thread of location. I worry that situated practices often get read as “situating theories,” though. Another issue to discuss!

trouble posting

I'm having trouble posting. Is this showing up?

This has to be a record, sadly

Hey, this has to be an almost record of blog continuity. I have posted twice in the same week! Planning to blog with my 601 class is a big motivator to keep this account going. I may move the blog to another site--we shall see. I'm going to talk to Collin about it because it's clear this is a pretty rudimentary space (at least the way I'm working with in it).

Well, I made it through the first week of classes. I'm looking forward to the semester, but I must admit I was absolutely sick by Thursday night with a headache. My theory is that three days of not getting in a run didn't help matters. I plan on a long run today to remedy that situation--maybe 6 miles at Beaver Lake Nature Center today. Or maybe I'll run three and crawl the rest.

I'll be blogging later this weekend about the readings for 601, and today is a "research day" so my focus is on my book _New Agrarian Rhetorics_. I was pleased to see that the _Nation_ focused its recent issue on Food Politics. There are a series of mini-essays by leading lights like Alice Waters, Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan, Vandana Shiva, and others on what is going on with the Food and Farming system with recommendations about how to change the food system. This issue is a great example of the new agrarian literacy that public interesting journalists, scientists, and farmers are trying to foster among the general public. I'm sure the issue will make it into the new agrarian literacy chapter of the book.

Here's a brief description of the book I'm working on from the prospectus:

New Agrarian Rhetorics will analyze, from a rhetorical perspective, the public debates, surrounding the ongoing loss of small family farms in the U.S, the rise of the food industrial complex, and the constellation of local food movements currently underway. The book will analyze media treatments of the contemporary farm crisis, public policy documents (including farm bills), nonfiction books and essays on the food industrial complex, alternative agrifood advocacy movements (local food, slow food, organic farming, community-supported agriculture, local farmers’ markets, farm to cafeteria programs), and efforts to sponsor alternative agrarian literacies through critical literacy education. The book argues for an alternative agrarian literacy as a significant component of the public rhetoric on agriculture; it also offers one of the first book-length rhetorical analyses of the public discourses surrounding the transformation and debate over the food and farming system in the U.S.

Anyway, on to reworking chapters 1 & 2 of the book and to that run, which I consider to be a form of prewriting and invention.

On the cusp

On the cusp of a new semester. It's just before 9:00 p.m., the night before classes begin for Fall term at SU! I am rediscovering my blog and reacquainting myself with the fact that I haven't written anything in it since early January. To quote my previous post, I am a blog loser! Well, no more....I am now entering a new era of blog-engaged life this term.

I've made the bold move of asking graduate students in CCR 601 to blog their reading notes and responses to class readings and general thoughts related to getting acquainted or better acquainted with Rhetoric and Composition as a field. Perhaps they will rebel tomorrow when I make this announcement. Perhaps they will yawn and look bored or arch their eyebrows and say "But of course we're going to keep blogs. We've been doing it for the past five years..."

I've been visiting Derek's blog Earth Wide Moth and watching his exam preparations and reading notes emerge, and I'm thinking it will be useful for 601 AND for me. I am planning on blogging 601 notes and questions, but I'd also like to blog about my book _New Agrarian Rhetorics_, which I worked on this summer.

I feel compelled here to briefly recount "What I Did on My Summer Vacation," the favored theme topic of the last 100 years, but I don't have the energy to write a witty account that reveals my complete. Nevertheless, some highlights:

--Played with Autumn! She is 3 1/2 feet tall now. She has a short hair cut, and she is ready to go to kindergarten but is 34 days too late with her birthday to make the cut-off. She went back to SU daycare today, and all is well.
--Worked with Kim Donehower and Charlotte Hogg to finish up and submit _Rural Literacies_ manuscript to Southern Illinois University Press.
--Worked on my book _New Agrarian Rhetorics_. I have a prospectus and some chapters hammered out.
--Took a trip with Tom and Autumn to visit family and friends out in Washington State. The Schells were chosen as the "Founding Family" for the Founders' Day celebration in my hometown: Cashmere, WA. Every year they honor a family that has been in the area for a long time. Fifty of the Schells and Schell-related and affiliated showed up to ride on cars and trailers down the parade route and wave at the locals. It was definitely a Sinclair Lewis moment.
--On a more sober note, my Mom underwent breast cancer treatments at the Wenatchee Valley Clinic Oncology Center in Wenatchee, WA. She had six weeks of radiation this summer preceded by a lupectomy. I was glad I could be there for several weeks of the treatments. She is feeling well and doing a lot of gardening now that the treatments are over. We are hopeful that this will be her only bout with cancer.
--Tom, Autumn, and I visited our friends Laura Roskos and Martin O'Brien in Cambridge, Mass and visited their parents' home near Falmouth, Mass. A big highlight was going with Martin's Dad to a local anti-war protest. Martin's father is a WWII veteran and ex-POW. His B-17 was shot-down behind enemy lines, and he was imprisoned in Germany. His time in the camps made a peace activist out of him. He is in his eighties now and avidly attends peace vigils every week in front of the Falmouth post office. I got to stand there with him at one of the Saturday vigils. His "Veterans Against the War" t-shirt provoked many interesting conversations with passersby.
--Kim VanAlkemade and her daughter Alex Hovet (age 14) came to visit us in early August. We're already trying to recruit Alex for SU.
--Worked with Susan and Jen on their dissertation projects and attended the CCR dissertation writing group. It was a pleasurable dissertation summer.
--Grew the usual backyard garden. Bumper crops: mixed lettuce, spinach, tomatoes. Second string crops: green onions, dill, basil, and pumpkins (I hope). I'm having no luck with broccoli--planted too late. My flower garden this year was both annuals and perennials. I have Dahlias and Gladiolas coming up. The perennials are a sign that I'm settling down in Syracuse. I even have a 10 year pin from the university to prove it.
--Trained for and Ran a 5k race--the Willow Bay Women's 5k on Aug. 19. I even ran intervals to prepare for it (400 meter repeats at the Nottingham track several times). I'm happy I did it, but I realize that being a "master's runner" (runner over 40) means confronting one's slower times. What happened to the 20 minute times of my late teens and early 20s? As John Bingham, the running columnist "The Penguin" says, "Waddle on friends."
--Diane (Grimes) and I continue to make our three-day a week sojourn to the gym, joining the ranks of the faculty mafia trying to infiltrate Archbold.

I'm sure there is more to talk about, but...it's time to put Autumn to bed.

Thinking about Place

I've received some interesting responses to my editorial on "The Farmer Wants a Wife" on Counterpunch. One guy wrote from Europe (location unspecified) and mentioned that the show is not a hit in Europe to the degree stated by FreeMantleMedia. He said he had never seen it on French or Belgian TV, and that people weren't really talking about it there. He said that he thoughtthat in the Netherlands the show played to a small audience. He said he thought TV2, the channel on which it appears, is probably only playing to two people! I wrote back and sent him an article from WorldScreen.com that noted the show had a strong debut in Austria recently. Another person wrote from out Portland, OR and mentioned the prevalence of corporate farms and explained the correct label by which to refer to a family farmer in Germany. Some good trivia. I have received a few other responses, but these were the most interesting. You never know who will turn up and what they will say.

My latest preoccupation is working on turning a chapter from my book into an article AND working on my sylllabus on Writing a Sense of Place. I have been researching definitions on place, and as I surmised, there are many debates over defining place across the discplines. The positions seem to be (and this is from memory) as follows. I'll come back in another post this week with some references.

--The most common definition seems to be this: place involves the interaction between people and their environment, whether it is a farmer's corn field or an urban street or a kitchen in a suburban cul de sac or a forest in a beautiful national park.
--Place is sometimes referred to as state of mind or a phase of someone's life, a "state of being." Some examples: "I was in a good place" or " I was in a place in my life where...." Some pan this definition because it's too "fuzzy." Which leads to the next definition.
--A sense of place is an extremely ambiguous phrase that can be used to describe anything, and it is often misused and abused. A newly minted suburb with houses that are identical can have a "sense of place." "It has a sense of place" (as in fake barn doors on the utility sheds and fake wagon wheel fences or something like that). When I saw how one of the writers I was reading had panned that phrase, I gave a guilty start. I use that phrase in my course title1

--There are also "non-places"--places that are "non-places": airport lounges, mega malls with chain stores, etc. There are also places that are not part of nations, but liminal places.

Writing about place often gets conflated with "nature writing" or "travel writing," but everything I'm reading suggests that this is a mistake. The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment has a number of very interesting syllabi for literature and composition courses that I am consulting. More later....

Kickstarting this blog again.

I am a blog loser!! I posted very few times last year, and it's too bad because I could have been saying brilliant things all year and receiving brilliant responses. Alas.

Since we're on the eve of the New Year, I hereby resolve to write in this blog more than a couple of times this coming year. Now that's a resolution I can keep.

I have been writing this year, though, just not in the blog. I will include some links to some of the public writing that I've been doing in this post and upcoming ones.

Here's my most recent piece, an editorial on the proposed reality show "The Farmer Wants a Wife."

http://counterpunch.org/schell12312005.html