The New York Sophist

Tomorrow starts the Learning Community on mid-career undergraduate writing on campus and I’m pretty eager to hear what everyone has to say. I oddly feel pretty solid about my own ideas and points of view, which is unusual for me. I usually like to have a few questions to share but don’t feel as strongly about my positions as I do tonight.

We did three readings for tomorrow’s session: Melzer’s Assignments Across the Curriculum, Chapter 2, Mya Poe’s essay “Re-framing Race in Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum” and a study by Anderson, et. al. “How Writing Contributes to Learning.” 

It’s all really great stuff and it worked together in a number of ways on my mind. 

My first thought is: I am not nearly as clear as I could be that the students can achieve what it is that I would like them to do in their writing. I am pretty clear, I think, in what the assignment is. I’m also pretty clear that they are going to have to do a lot of work to get there. But I’m never clear that they, as hard workers, can achieve what appears to be a high standard. This is going to take some work. I also spent a lot of time on Monday reflecting on what a shit teacher I am after I attended an assessment meeting where it was pretty clear that I am bad at teaching actual, measurable, meaningful college courses as we went through my students’ writing. I’ve written about what a shoddy job I did in that class, so no surprise. Plenty to think about there. This week is a week of reflecting on whether or not the university is the place for me. At least these readings gave me some handholds to try to scale this question. 

Secondly, the sad lack of creative, expressive, generative writing where students are creating and making something is pointed out, and how valuable it is for students to do that. Once again, the emphasis on skill-rhetoric, mixed with the harmful “Can I grade this?” assignment-framing question yields a bunch of work that is useless, unstimulating, and beneath our students’ level. I feel really bad reading this stuff as I really thought a lot of my assignments were creative. But it seems there’s a lot of work to do here as well. Again, another path up the question is revealed and I have some good handholds to help get a grip on what has to be done. 

The thing that struck me the most is the silly ban on phones and laptops that most faculty enforce here at St. John’s while simultaneously lamenting the ability of students to make convincing, sustained arguments. If you change the audience you get a very different picture. Most of our students are politically engaged via hip hop music that is available online and discussed in forums on the internet, something Melzer identifies as possibly prolific in courses, but difficult to measure as it is never graded or treated as a very serious part of the course. This is where our students have a lot of resources for crafting good argument, style, and rhetorical savvy for particular audiences. Listening to a beat or engaging with a beat while composing/inventing something to say or write might help them activate resources on argument craft that they didn’t know they had. I think hip hop is an overlooked resource for helping students understand that they already get how to make sustained, convincing arguments and how to evaluate them very well considering context and audience – the rhetorical situation.

The only hold up on this is the problem of teacher-as-examiner. Nobody that I know is going to want to give up this role. The desire for power – particularly disciplinary power- is everywhere among the faculty and the joy of exercising it over the students is a delightful privilege for a lot of folks who call themselves “teachers.” I really think this requires a lot of strategic effort to convince a number of teachers that the students can craft good arguments in this weird(ing) way and evaluate them, but you won’t be able to get it. Perhaps if the students were able to craft a textbook like project that supplemented the writing guide (or whatever the teacher assigns) this might help bridge the gap. It’s a longshot though. I think the suggestion of including hip hop to show students they already get composition of argument just breaks apart on this barrier.

We didn’t read Geoffrey Sirc, but I love his idea that Jackson Pollock transformed his relationship to art by placing the canvas on the floor. Art happened somewhere else when that perspective shift occurred. How can we put our assignments on the floor, or instruct our students to put Microsoft Word’s horrific white abyss, cursorial eye flashing at us on the floor to say to it, “You will record what is crafted here; you are not the craft.” This is the goal of improving college writing, to figure out how to teach students the confidence to speak to their laptops this way and to start composing like I am certain they can. 

My facebook feed is packed with nonsense that is hard to decipher. This is peak Facebook, and what I think is the reason I engage on the platform. The only reason I have it is because it’s the best way to communicate with students for activities and such. Without it, it was very hard to get student response. They just do not reply to email at all unless they think they are going to fail a course. It doesn’t matter what I’m offering to them. If I didn’t direct a debate program that engaged in travel, I wouldn’t have a facebook at all. 

Currently my facebook is making too much sense, filled with postings of people who are obsessed with preservation of life and time: Endless posts about marathons, half marathons, triathalons, quarter marathons, yoga, whole 30, whole 60, paleo, semi-paleo, carb free, sugar free, gluten free, etc. The list continues to permute itself into a tizzy. Why such obsession with control of the health of the body and the length of the life?

There is a purely selfish reason that I can get on board with which is that doing these things makes you feel better, more alert, and awake during the day. I do think this is convincing. Less convincing are all the arguments about being a good person, doing a good thing, or eating the way we were intended to eat. All of these are rhetorical constructions designed to persuade us of something. Policing our body’s environment or our body chemistry is a way of feeling like we are in control, that we are good people, that we have made good choices, and when we see someone overweight we can know we are better than they are.

There is a great feeling of the loss of control right now, in politics, government, the environment, and other systems. It’s the breakdown of the persuasive power of ideology in the face of the collapse of institutions’ ability to successfully deliver that promise. Faith in institutions is incredibly high, so high that we have turned over our wishes and desires to them in toto. How many failures will it take for the institutional system to collapse? We aren’t there yet but we do have a model – the Lehman Brothers collapse. This only (!) included subprime mortgages lent out by bankers who just wanted to make money (this is still the number one reason my students say they are pursuing their choice of major) and didn’t notice their desire was collapsing the system that allowed them to do that. Up next: the consumer credit collapse and the higher education collapse. These will not be so isolated. I think we can feel it, so we police our body chemistry in a way to make us feel that somehow we are in control of something. 

Obviously we are told to police our body shape, but this is so we can consume particular things instead of others. We can’t have health collapsing consumer markets, so a consumer narrative must be created for those who don’t want to participate in the donut and Dorito life. If this were more about health than policing bodies into a particular relationship with their material selves, we’d have legislation against particular kinds of foods, not subsidies for their creation (such as corn). 

I’m still going to keep eating donuts and Doritos. Let the cheese do away with me silently in my sleep. Why preserve my life? So I can increase my risk of dying in a violent mass shooting event? So I can feel sad and powerless in the light of such violence which will inevitably continue as long as I breathe? So I can keep reading about the systemic injustice we perpetrate on others in the name of the good, democracy, and so forth? So I can talk to my future students and tell them cute stories of what birds sounded like? What honey tasted like? What strange varieties of fruit we could buy? When the sky wasn’t always an angry, dust-filled red? When the oceans weren’t pea-green and steam didn’t waft from them during the day? To find out what happens on Young Sheldon? Everywhere you turn there is nothing but the visage of horror. What exactly is the point of hanging around this place for so long? Pass the pasta, let’s order a pizza.

At times when I don’t feel so crushingly down about the world and being in it, I wonder why and how quickly this happens. Just a few hours ago I was having a great day. I had read on my friend’s facebook about his nervousness in the face of heading to an unfamiliar town to do some teaching. He said, “It will be ok because I will do my best.” I thought that this was a good thing to hold close to my heart as I approach these stress filled days. It seemed to be working. But if you structure your days like a Jenga game, it’s going to be unsustainable. Things sort of fell apart this evening. 

I do face everyday trying to do my best, but inevitably I am torn down on all sides. I think that it could just be perception, but I feel like every pivot I make just puts me face-to-face with another issue to resolve. On other days, this isn’t reality. But the slide is so fast, and so inevitable, one has to wonder about where it comes from. I think I need to construct a respite from all the crazy work I make for myself and have one place where I can go and not feel a demand to make things better. I think that place might just be when I read and write.

Why preserve? What is being preserved? Just live it out, and create from decay. The concept of Charnel Ground is a good one to think about. Monks who could not resolve the attachment to life would meditate in the middle of it. Life and death, siblings not enemies, together because they grew up together. They eat together. They play together. We are with them now.

Is it time for the University to abandon the rhetoric of “skills?”

I’m starting to think so. Several experiences I have had over the last few days make me think that if the University, or any department, cannot beat back the ideological addiction to speaking about what they do in terms of “skills,” they won’t survive the higher-ed bubble. 

This week I’m honored to start my participation in a group of colleagues who are interrogating, as a learning-community, the question of how to improve students’ mid-career writing. My interpretation of what this means is pretty limited, but for now I’ll say that I was attracted to it because of my perception of a great peak in first year students’ abilities to communicate (over 2 semesters or so) and then a plateau that often declines near the end a bit. I think I’m in an unusual position to watch these changes as working with debate students allows me a long-term view over time (diachronic) rather than the short-term comparative view of people in one course (synchronic). This might change as I encounter other considerations from other points of view. But suffice it to say, this experience – doing some of the readings and looking at the applications that others wrote for the group – has made me think that one of the major hurdles in student writing quality is to find a better metaphor than a “skill.”

The other thing that happened was I attended my required program director briefing that I have to go to annually for leading student programs overseas. We are headed to Morocco on Friday and I am ready to spend a week rushing around getting ready. At this meeting, the director told me how he liked my program, that it provided the sort of experience and encounters that a study abroad program should contain. This got me thinking because there was no mention in our conversation about what skills can be distilled from trips overseas.

Yes, I think skill is a metaphor. I think language is, at its root, metaphorical, but the metaphor of a skill answers the question “what is writing most like that we also do?” I have broadened this question to “what is university like that we also do?” Skill just doesn’t seem to capture or fix a very good idea of what the university does (or can do). It really reduces, or acts as a reductive element on the power of the University and how we conceive of it. 

The skills response is a really reactive and sad description of university courses. It pretends that this practice happens for one student, working over a problem, and figuring out how to solve it in a transferrable way, then taking that set of practices over to another problem and also finding success. I feel this is why so many university advertisements must include an image of a person, usually male, usually non-white, in a lab coat carefully placing drops of liquid into a tray in a very complex laboratory environment. This image stands in for the entire lazy conception of the university as skill – here’s a repeatable task that, in the context of the background, means this student is smart. This smartness was learned as a skill here.

I think the University sets itself up for total failure as being the place for skill development or acquisition. Skills are developed and refined over a lifetime, so many will simply report that what they needed for success in life they learned later on, or on the job. Many companies report they want graduates who can communicate and interact with others, not those with skills in the particular work they will be doing – the companies know they can train people on the particulars of their business when they hire them. Often times courses do not have a skill focus, but are much more about surveying or introducing differing points of view or ways of identifying and addressing problems. 

The solution to this I’ve heard many say is that the university is about “soft skills” – so let’s take the thing we don’t provide and claim we provide a less definitive version of it? No thank you.

So what do we provide at the university? I’m not sure. But I can say that there are powerful rhetorical frames available for our use. 

The first is that we provide encounter. Encounter is the term I’ve been using in my pedagogy for the past couple of years. The professor constructs moments of encounter for students so they can work through the exposure, understanding, and incorporation of ideas, texts, or methods into their lives. Encounter is also happening to the professor – often when you assign a text and the students read it, the read they provide is a bit different than what you expected. It’s not incorrect, nor is it your read. It’s something else. So this is an encounter.

We also do teach problem solving and other things people might call skills, but we do it in the opposite environment of the advert lab tech – we teach these things in very diverse classrooms among a lot of people who the student wouldn’t choose to associate with. Classrooms and the many types of people they contain is a powerful resource for the encounter narrative. Student learn how to talk about ideas and evaluate them in rooms of people who have very different experiences and points of view. There’s also the everyday life of the campus where one is engaging in conversations and interactions with others who are having encounters with ideas. The list goes on.

Encounter helps to develop what I call uncertainty management, which is a really great practice for people to have if they live in a democratic order where technology and procedures are always in flux due to quick advancement of technology. Decisions must be flexible and based on the context of what’s happening. Encountering the unexpected and having one’s perspective challenged is the only way to become familiar and comfortable with this uncertainty.

Another approach is the idea of exposure. There’s a powerful, yet simple argument that university attendees should be exposed to things that they would not choose to be exposed to, nor would they randomly be exposed to those things given a normal life where they didn’t seek them out. This is an argument for required courses on exactly those subjects students complain about most – things like Shakespeare, poetry appreciation, and philosophy. More of these courses, taught well, is what the university provides as it shows people what’s out there and what isn’t out there but could be. In a Marcusean sense, the graduates see university as what could be, “the ought,” and are frustrated by “the is” that they find in daily life. I think that such exposure helps develop a better world, or at least the sense that there are possibilities out there for alternative ways of arranging things. 

Finally, although there’s a lot more I could type here, I would say the other important metaphor for what we do is practice. The university is a place for the practice of the self. This begs the question: What sort of self would you like to be? This question, not some job-oriented major or career adviser, should be the question that students ruminate on for a while. Treating college as a place to practice skills for a job in an extant resource-distribution order eliminates the chance for them to imagine and craft a self that might reject those parameters. Getting an answer together might take years; they might never finish. Working on the self seems a life-long pursuit that can be fostered with great intensity at the university level. They will decide whether or not to support the system around them given how it helps or thwarts this development. This is also quite a revolutionary role for the university. 

There’s a lot more to say about this, but you have been forced to read a lot in one sitting. I’ll return to this. What I’ll close with is the idea that a defense around skills is a lazy defense that rolls the university over to the powers-that-be in consumer capitalism. Until we become serious about crafting alternatives with our students in classrooms and questioning what the university can be, we won’t be able to do anything but serve an order through our teaching that in our scholarship and writing we lament.

In the last post I suggested work on pedagogical methods that would help distinguish the classical categories of episteme and doxa. After thinking about it for a day or so, I think this is not the issue at all – these forms of knowing could not be more separated. Episteme is considered to be knowledge, and doxa is considered to be opinion. What we need is a way to bring doxa back into the rubric of knowledge. 

There are many topoi here that we can work with – the idea that “everyone knows” certain things about what you need to do to get a form filed with the government, or access some benefit in your taxes, etc. We also have the rise of protest politics where the wisdom of the crowd is not only right but good, so we put it on display in large marches around the sites of power in our cities. We have TV shows such as the one I see advertised on the subway, The Wisdom of the Crowd, where crowdsourcing is meant to solve crimes or something. And then there’s the endless commodification of voting, for everything from new candy and chip flavors to which commercials we will be forced to watch during sporting events. 

But these are not really good topoi, are they? They all have something in common that I am having trouble putting my finger on. I believe they all seem to hint or demonstrate the idea that crowd-knowledge is good or celebratory knowledge, but there might be something wrong with it still. I think it might be mechanistic: These crowd knowledge claims are about access of knowledge and distribution, not creation of knowledge. 

Consider the website Kickstarter, something I love and have spent a lot of time browsing. Kickstarter appears at first look to be doxa but it is missing the same element – it is a place where the crowd confirms the value or wisdom of these products that come from experts who designed these things to address particular problems. 

This might be the trouble with all the examples – they are moments where the crowd is used to confirm the esoteric or universal rightness of the answer that was provided via episteme. In most cases where the crowd has a different knowledge from the official knowledge (or could we say the confirmed, or confirmable knowledge?) it is often the crowd knowledge that is frozen out. Doxa doesn’t usually win versus episteme. The crowd’s wisdom is in helping others in the crowd find via popularity what cannot be realized alone through the proper standards of evaluating knowledge.

In thinking about non episteme knowledge that is doxa, it’s hard to think of good examples. The only one that comes to mind is interpersonal knowledge, such as when a family knows what sort of food, drink, TV program, or movie another member of the family will certainly like. There’s also the democratic sense of “rightness” that is often associated with doxa. But it’s hard to think of some that would appeal in a debate about the issues we debate about.

Perhaps the best example I have for now falls within Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca’s theory of argument pairs. Often this is a comparison meant to generate an argument or a meaning – “this looks like this, but really it is this.” Such arguments are so common it’s quite funny to think that at some point they didn’t really have a name or a category until the 1950s. 

The argument pair can serve doxa in cases that work like this: “They tell us that this is X, but we won’t be fooled; we all know what is really going on.” This is a doxastic appeal that is often found in conspiracy theory rhetoric as well as the water-cooler rhetoric between employees in regards to management policies. We also talk this way about politics. But I wonder if this is an appeal to episteme via doxa, like the earlier examples were.

Another read on it is that rhetorically one constitutes the relationship and partnership between episteme and doxa by how one establishes the claims in a speech. It’s good to keep the relationship rhetorical so you can move between and around the terms in order to make your case persuasive. “Real knowledge” can have a home anywhere, as long as the audience recognizes that location as a home, recognizable as the comfortable and cozy place that knowledge lives. 

In the last post I suggested work on pedagogical methods that would help distinguish the classical categories of episteme and doxa. After thinking about it for a day or so, I think this is not the issue at all – these forms of knowing could not be more separated. Episteme is considered to be knowledge, and doxa is considered to be opinion. What we need is a way to bring doxa back into the rubric of knowledge. 

There are many topoi here that we can work with – the idea that “everyone knows” certain things about what you need to do to get a form filed with the government, or access some benefit in your taxes, etc. We also have the rise of protest politics where the wisdom of the crowd is not only right but good, so we put it on display in large marches around the sites of power in our cities. We have TV shows such as the one I see advertised on the subway, The Wisdom of the Crowd, where crowdsourcing is meant to solve crimes or something. And then there’s the endless commodification of voting, for everything from new candy and chip flavors to which commercials we will be forced to watch during sporting events. 

But these are not really good topoi, are they? They all have something in common that I am having trouble putting my finger on. I believe they all seem to hint or demonstrate the idea that crowd-knowledge is good or celebratory knowledge, but there might be something wrong with it still. I think it might be mechanistic: These crowd knowledge claims are about access of knowledge and distribution, not creation of knowledge. 

Consider the website Kickstarter, something I love and have spent a lot of time browsing. Kickstarter appears at first look to be doxa but it is missing the same element – it is a place where the crowd confirms the value or wisdom of these products that come from experts who designed these things to address particular problems. 

This might be the trouble with all the examples – they are moments where the crowd is used to confirm the esoteric or universal rightness of the answer that was provided via episteme. In most cases where the crowd has a different knowledge from the official knowledge (or could we say the confirmed, or confirmable knowledge?) it is often the crowd knowledge that is frozen out. Doxa doesn’t usually win versus episteme. The crowd’s wisdom is in helping others in the crowd find via popularity what cannot be realized alone through the proper standards of evaluating knowledge.

In thinking about non episteme knowledge that is doxa, it’s hard to think of good examples. The only one that comes to mind is interpersonal knowledge, such as when a family knows what sort of food, drink, TV program, or movie another member of the family will certainly like. There’s also the democratic sense of “rightness” that is often associated with doxa. But it’s hard to think of some that would appeal in a debate about the issues we debate about.

Perhaps the best example I have for now falls within Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca’s theory of argument pairs. Often this is a comparison meant to generate an argument or a meaning – “this looks like this, but really it is this.” Such arguments are so common it’s quite funny to think that at some point they didn’t really have a name or a category until the 1950s. 

The argument pair can serve doxa in cases that work like this: “They tell us that this is X, but we won’t be fooled; we all know what is really going on.” This is a doxastic appeal that is often found in conspiracy theory rhetoric as well as the water-cooler rhetoric between employees in regards to management policies. We also talk this way about politics. But I wonder if this is an appeal to episteme via doxa, like the earlier examples were.

Another read on it is that rhetorically one constitutes the relationship and partnership between episteme and doxa by how one establishes the claims in a speech. It’s good to keep the relationship rhetorical so you can move between and around the terms in order to make your case persuasive. “Real knowledge” can have a home anywhere, as long as the audience recognizes that location as a home, recognizable as the comfortable and cozy place that knowledge lives.