Author Archives: rgarner2

Response Week 12 – Robb Garner

Ah, back to pedagogy.  After poetry and comics it’s like having to get up and return to manual labor on an August hot summer day after a proper southern lunch.  But to get movin’:

Dr. Sample’s brief essays got me thinking back to my undergraduate education, and I think I can see which courses were made with learning goals and significant insights in mind (or something near to backwards design) and which weren’t.  One thing I’ll say is that I belive survey courses lend themselves to the learning-goal orientation of backward design more than Wiggins and Mctighe (I believe) give them credit for.  I know the suggestion wasn’t that survey courses are necessarily all breath and no depth, and I do agree that the survey course can lean toward that American jack-of-all-trades master-of-jack-shit phenomenon.  However,  it seems to me there is almost no way to take a course oriented around one (or a few) of these and not come away with a number of crucial or important insights.  A professor, with his expert knowledge, teaches certain books (the ones he loves the most, thinks the students would benefit from the most, or which will most readily offer his expert insight to the students) of a particular era, theme, concept, or society—and these, given their cohesion, are designed to transfer.   In a British literature course I took we delved first into thematic issues, and then into social movements, how to read literature, and the function of literature in society—all by going through a carefully selected, chorological reading list.  I couldn’t bring myself to read Mrs. Dalloway—I know, I know—but I remember The Good Soldier especially well.  Aside from a few insights that I took away—most of which I emulsified in my history studies at the time—The Good Soldier is what stayed with me.  If the course was especially focused on (rather than involving or conducive to) some greater insights that the instructor specifically designed, I wonder if I would have come away with that same love for The Good Soldier.  Would it have been grouped or subsumed into the larger concept—could something have been taken away from The Good Soldier?

Of course, it is totally possible that The Good Soldier would have had an even greater impact on me, have been an even more influential and insightful work otherwise.  I don’t mean to assume the role of pessimist so regularly, but isn’t being critical the mark of a good student?  Just two things: One, to me the “digging” focus of the backward design seems to smack of something like a post-New Critical New Criticism approach; an effort that, like New Critical teachers, has an agenda, a right and a wrong, but relies more on the teacher rather than the teaching.  Second, I take issue with that idea that backward design is moving away from the “prepackaged observations and readily digestible interpretations” of the traditional book-based method.  Of course, that would certainly be the case if the instructor was a New Critic, or something there-about, but it seems to me that if you arrange your course around what you want your students to learn then you have essentially oriented your course towards somewhat “automatic” and “prepackaged observations.”  How can students actually be “self-directed learners” if your determining the direction; aren’t they therefore teacher-directed learners under the guise of self-direction?  I wonder if the backward design, in identifying goals for a literature classroom, could potentially limit the scope of that classroom—foreclose, if you will, uncoverages that lie outside of those predetermined ones.  I suppose there is a danger behind literature being second to understanding.  I’ve returned to my eternal struggle with literature instruction: Will the literature still be enjoyable (will it be able to remain itself or will it be transformed into an academic-variant of itself)?

The irony to all this, however, is that my opinions/insights come directly out of the enduring knowledge I received from the better classes of my undergraduate education, all of which included, to be sure, a backward approach.  However, they were also based on wholly tentative syllabi.  I was taught that goal-orientation was problematic precisely because envisioning an outcome predetermines it in some way which will not allow for other outcomes to be as acceptable and, in doing so, undermines the natural value of whatever process is used to get there.  I guess the case I’d like to make is simply that a course design, in the best of all possible worlds (where the teacher has the desire, determination, and time to teach it as he/she sees fit), ought to have a purpose, direction—a goal, if you must—but not in such as a way as to limit the potential that is manifest in a literature classroom.  I wonder what a literature class that had only one required reading from the beginning would look like.  A class that has the first 2-4 weeks dedicated to one book and the next dedicated to a book that the teacher (and students?) will be selecting based on the previous readings?  Everyone has an Amazon prime account, don’t they?  In two days everyone could have the next book—easy as that.  I wonder how students would respond to that kind of class as well—would they be naturally more inclined to be involved?  It seems to me that they would be.  It also seems like it would be in keeping with some of the other concepts we’ve covered thus far.

I totally agree with Fink’s “forward-looking assessment questions” and it reminds me of what I imagine would have been the pedagogy of that history professor Dr. Sample mentioned in class a few weeks ago.  I also studied history as an undergrad and I think I did mainly story-telling for all my lower-level, non-primary-research (what a snobby student would not call “real” history) courses.  I would have liked that kind of assessment as a student; I don’t think students want to regurgitate, because there is no fun in it.  This, I think, goes back to Gee.  There’s never regurgitation in video games—there’s painful repetition (as in online Call of Duty or something)—but even then it’s a utilization of what you know to perform an act working towards victory.

Robb Garner – Response Week 11

The introduction to “The Confessions of Nat Turner: Text and Context” is a wonderful read not only in and of itself (how it serves to inform and, for us, contextualize Baker’s Nat Turner) but as a formulae for any historical treatment of a text.  I found the historicity of Kenneth Greenberg’s article to be this perfect balance between a well-grounded and yet truly expansive effort.  By ‘historicity’ I mean a discussion about how authentic a historical document can be and in what ways that historical text can be authenticated and/or contextualized with other historical documents.  I studied history at university, and I wish I had read this sooner.  The line, “The act of recounting, whether personal or historical, often involves transforming the people or events of the past into objects we can use in the present” (26), is a great summation of the study of history (as opposed to “the learning of history”).

With this text in mind—and some of those great, sepia-tinted photographs wandering around in my mind—I approached Nat Turner for a third time without very many expectations.  I tried to stop forcing myself to pay closer attention to some pages than I was inclined to give them (which was part of my project for the second reading), but on the other hand I wanted to donate extra attention to those pages which I felt were the most powerful.  Most of these were the ones that stood out to me in the beginning or the ones that our classmates traced and discussed last class (I trust the intuition of a first read and the collective wisdom of the class).  One of the things I discovered early on was that graphic novels function more like poems than tradition novels, at least in regards to how we traditionally read poems and novels.  This isn’t a necessarily esoteric insight—graphic novels have a select number of images as poems do words, as opposed to the horde of words, images, characters and changes that typify novels—but I enjoyed making the realization.  The picture of the noose around the woman’s foot in the beginning was especially moving to me this time around.  Unlike most, I didn’t find the violence of the rebellion especially distasteful, and each time I’ve read this book I’ve found myself rooting for Nat Turner pretty freely.  But the depiction of rage on pages 174-178 altered that view; I was reminded that this was a historical retelling of some kind, that this was a product of rage—violence begetting violence, suffering over suffering.  In the end, redemption is found (or consummated) by Turner’s death.  Maybe that is the only kind of redemption possible for this kind of story—a movement away from the Old Testament to the New.  On the other hand, I wonder if it was not so much the result itself—which, as Greenberg points out, was relatively minimal on the scale of world history—as it is the story which has endured (if not prominently) for such a long time.  It doesn’t seem strange to me that Nat Turner, who must have had a great love and reverence for the written word, would have passed on his story even into the hands of a miserly white lawyer.  Greenberg’s text also made me think about what historical context I tried, both the first, second, and third times I read it, to put Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner in.  This, in turn, made me think about how that immediate contextualization speaks to my education and my history.

Finally, the big insight I took away from this third, contextualized reading was that I finally felt comfortable enough with the text to criticize it.  I began to think: I needed words here.  And: This is unnecessary and messes up the linguistic flow of the visual text.  And I began to want more of the story and different elements in it here and there.  A few times I felt that the whole story should have just been visually represented.  I believe what Greenberg says, about how retelling a story transforms it, in some way, into the now (just like traditions renew the history out of which they were born), and a lot of times I felt that Baker’s retelling was not fictionalized enough; he did not fill in the Nat Turner’s narrative gaps in the creative ways that I wanted them filled in.  Why didn’t he tell the dynamic story of Nat Turner and his wife?  Did Nat Turner have friends?  What about his suffering?  Why was the intimacy of the slave-master connection not touched on at all?  (In fact, the text presented a very defined and distant establishment.)  Now, I don’t think I’d be able to defend many of my critiques because I know nothing about art or graphic novels.  When it came to thinking that a certain representation was misleading or too underdeveloped, I became a little frustrated by not having the vocabulary to voice what I felt.

The best moment in the book, I think, has to be the mural on pages 102-103.  There’s this descent of the wrathful holy spirit through a lightning bolt—the spirit of Jehovah, God of the Old Testament, the one of fire and brimstone who took away the first born sons of Egypt so that the Jews could be freed from their bondage—and Turner’s arms raised like they would be in prayer but with balled fists, and the tempest behind him, and his scream.  The page got me thinking about that sermon, “I am a sinner in the hands of an angry God,” and some of the stories in Genesis that I don’t but should know by heart.  Then, because Greenburg mentioned that he promised invulnerability to rebels that “held crab claws in their mouths” (p.17), I spent over an hour researching the failed slave rebellion leader Gullah Jack.  Afterward, I wondered if all or any of this is really admissible.  I mentioned this in my first post on Nat Turner, but I still don’t know what sort of textual history this story wants to be placed in or read with.  Perhaps, though, the neat thing about graphic novels is that you are free to bring your own textual history into them in a way that is usually not possible in traditional text-mediums.  At least I was free to do this because I didn’t have any other comic references.  And I’d be willing to defend this point on the grounds that it made the work that much more enjoyable.

Reading or Comic-Reading? – Robb Garner

McCloud’s breakdown of the cognitive process involved in reading comics was quite illuminating.  I certainly agree with his use of the word “faith” in chapter three to describe the process by which we conceive of a single reality from our innumerable but fragmented observations and experiences.  Chapter 4 felt a little flat to me; the assumption that a photograph represents only a single moment in time doesn’t seem to be especially relevant.  I have no photographical skill myself—which is really a bummer—but I appreciate photography precisely because it is capable of presenting so much in what seems like so little (i.e. a single second); every photograph is a story In Medias Res and the best ones expand into both the past and future exponentially.  In chapter five, about the use of lines, this seems to be something left unsaid; while Chester Gould was able to help create his character Dick Tracy with bold lines and excessive shading (in the picture on p. 126 Dick Tracy explodes out of the netherworld of his blazer) these were also presented in tandem with Tracy’s dialogue and situation.  Moreover, Dick Tracy himself is found in a context of the hard-broiled American hero.  Dick Tracy, the comic, helped establish this genre, of course, but it also played off of previously established roles—most notably the cowboy myth.

Rabkin seemed like a good example of the strong apologist movement, defending the validity of comic books against their poor reputation in a way that doesn’t seem totally authentic to me.  For one, I don’t think that reputation actually exists in my generation.  For another, we might not read comics in schools, but that doesn’t mean it’s because we think they are below education.  It’s quite likely because comics are 1. New 2. Untraditional and 3. Not universally popular; many teachers don’t like comic books, so why would they go out of their way to teach them?  I’ve read one or two graphic novels, which I enjoyed to some extent, but I’ve never considered comics lowly or foolish.  I think one thing that might betray comics is that since we use the same inferential-interpretation method for reading them as we do constantly to make meaning (reality) in our lives the impetus is to read a comic quickly; it doesn’t take the time that reading a traditional narrative does, and because the comic is a series of images (a strip) we aren’t asked to patiently go through each image in the way that being at a museum asks us to look at each painting even though there are many.  As Cohn says, it’s easy to forget that a comic strip occurs on a page.

The readings this week have really got me thinking about the difference—if there is one—between interpreting words and interpreting pictures.  Comics blur the line that does, in some small but pragmatic way (the respective medium of presentation), exist between them, but they also ask us to ask the question, “Do we read comics?”  This question, in turn, makes us stop to think about our definition of reading.  I keep thinking about the cliché, “A picture speaks a thousand words.”  I wonder.  Like interpreting a poem, skilled interpreters engaged simultaneously in an interpretation will find a considerably larger amount of meaning / potential meaning than a single, isolated, and otherwise untrained interpreter.  This suggests that a picture speaks as many words as the interpreter is capable of reading into it.  Moreover, we’d all probably describe the same picture definitely, just like we’d draw the same description differently (though our artistic abilities would differ significantly).  Not only are the amount but the type of words will also be different.  The same, though, is true with interpreting a poem (as we have seen).  Is there any essential difference in the means of interpretation?  What if we did a comic strip for the Ball Turret Gunner poem?

I’m inclined to conclude—however hastily—that the distinction between interpreting pictures and literature is mute, and that because reading is, at least in my viewed, an act of interpreting words the term “reading” itself could be applied to interpreting comic books or picture books without much controversy.  Thinking about that, maybe Rabkin’s right and I am wrong: Maybe the reason we don’t spend time interpreting comic books is that while we’re capable of agreeing that graphic novels (for instance) are a legitimate form of art we’re still not going to approach them with the methods we have learned and practiced from and for tradition models.  For example, on p. 89 in Nat Turner we see young Nat reading the bible.  This is the first image of the bible we have in the novel, and the cross on the cover is upside down.  On the next few pages it is right-side up.  Now, is this original inversion because Nat Turner, trying to teach himself to read, probably first didn’t understand which way the letters / words were oriented?  Or is Kyle Baker indicating the cross on purpose to indicate that Nat Turner was destined from the beginning to be like Peter rather than Christ?  (In Catholicism, the Petrine cross is an inverted cross which represents Peter, the first Pope [who was given “the keys of the kingdom” by Christ], who was crucified upside down.)  I thought about the second possibility first, but I ruled it out almost immediately.  Why?  I suppose because I was reading a comic book and not a poem.  On the other hand, one of the problems we face with comic books could be that we non-comic book readers don’t know the tradition that comic book writers come out of.  When I read a published poem, I have an idea about what the poet has read and some conventions that will be used or ignored—these will help me interpret the poem.  With comic books I don’t know any of this.  Is the tradition employed that of comic books themselves (do comic books reference previous comic books the way literature references previous literature), or the traditions of photography, or literature, or all of them?  Can I really be asked to juggle all these different mediums and their traditions?  Taking comic books too lightly might be a problem, but the prospect of taking them seriously presents its own problems as well.

Videogames, Identity, and Learning

Response – Week 7

Robb Garner

I found James Paul Gee’s book to be absolutely wonderful.  I say this as a person who would certainly not identify themselves as a gamer.  I (still) believe video games are a massive waste of time, but I admit I do, on occasion, get a big kick out of beating my friends at a game of virtual soccer and then lecturing them on my manifest greatness.  At any rate, there are a number of passages I’d like to respond to and I’ll try and limit myself to a few and be concise about it.

To me, Gee’s learning and identity section (chapter three) was the most profound.  I found it to be the most crucial to his argument (identity being an essential element—if not indistinguishable from—a person’s relationship/indebtedness to their culture) as well as the most illuminating.  His description of playing Arcanum had such a direct parallel to learning: “Your adventures in Arcanum start with catastrophe… Your quest begins… By the time you finish, your character is very different” (p.48).  In the classroom, you have a problem, the assignment is to finish it, and hopefully a conclusion that alters your thinking / knowledge in some way.  Gee expands this concept into the four-stage “probe/hypothesize/reprobe/rethink” education process, which applies to both children and “expert practitioners” (p.92).  As an undergrad I studied the epistemology of Lonergan (in Catholic circles he is a famous philosopher) and much of his theories on how and why a person acquires knowledge are a facsimile of this same basic formula.  I found this really impressive.  I remember reading that Gee is Catholic, so maybe this is not by mistake.  I was also very taken with the insight that students want to—or can be encouraged to—take on the identity “they are playing” in the classroom (p.62).  I wonder if any studies have been done to test whether or not a student’s ability to assume the role of “scientist” (to use his example) increased if the student were to don a white labcoat every time he/she engaged in some scientific activity.  I feel like I would have liked that very much as a child; it would have been like playing scientist rather than doing biology (ick).  Maybe we should just give kids cloaks and tell them that grammar is language magic?

For a book with such a radical title, Gee’s method and argument were balanced and self-aware.  His notes on progressive pedagogies (p. 137-138) that do not “set a good foundation for later learning,” is a good example of this.  For me, though, he glossed over the fact that a great number of gamers are not “good gamers,” that a lot of people who play video games play them “the wrong way.”  An example of this might the latent gamer who enjoys video games solely and arrogantly as a competitive platform.  But it seems to me that if video games do indeed recreate the learning process in such a profound and direct way than the development of the “bad gamer” must have some greater insight as well.  In particular, I wish Gee touched on the addictive nature of videogames.  Gamers become (and have a reputation for becoming) possessed—they become inundated in their games in a way that is normally reserved for eccentrics like the mad scientist or self-destructive writer.  When Gee says that the potential for video games is as great as our awareness of their cognitive impact is small, I wonder what kind of a response research into the latter would make to Gee’s claims about the former.  Is learning addictive?  Or is only this hyper-visual split-second powerfully-created-fantastical-world of magnificent stimuli addictive?  Can we reduce their possessive capacity to identity?…  If I had to, I’d posit that good video games create an environment where our inherent “desire to know” (this is Lonergan) is indeed stimulated in a way that facilitates learning along the staves our cognition is inherently tuned to—but that this stimulation engages us at some cognitive level (I lack the proper vocabulary to shape / articulate this thought) that is disturbingly similar to addiction.  The relationship between videogames and THC is also a phenomenon that needs to be researched.  Ask a 16 year old about being high and assuming the role of whoever the character is in the latest GTA.  I mention all this because even the “poor video player,” the one that doesn’t learn, explore, or build—but does repeatedly (the ubiquitous Call of Duty player)—nevertheless engages in the virtual, social, and personal identities that a videogame presents.  Even the “bad gamer” takes pride in his virtual virtuosity, an interest in his character, and displays an effort to enter the virtual by way of the physical.  For many young men, this is putting on a gasmask that has been converted into a bong or some other small teleportational amulet.  I don’t know why I find this so fascinating, but it seems an insight worth harking on: Interest and identity seem to be the inextricable core of Gee’s theory on learning.  Finally, I think you could take a lot of Gee’s study and rethink it in regards to lifting weights.  I think Gee would agree with this.  There’s a brilliant universe there too, and it is one populated by a stereotype which oddly parallels that of videogames.

I appreciate that Gee points out that gamers, far from being social recluses, are extremely social individuals who simply operate within a society separate from the one that identifies them as antisocial.  Gee calls gamers an affinity group, I believe, but “the group” is too large and the dedication too great for either “affinity” or “group”; gaming is a society and it has a language, practice, and economy to verify it.  My mother’s best friend’s son (I know that is a mouthful) is one of these guys; I’m pals with him, and I have to credit him with opening me up to not only this reality but to a number of different perspectives.  Unlike my friends who spend a massive amount of time playing videogames—most of it high—and who are part of this culture passively, Jake is involved in all the ways Gee praises; he builds, comments, refines, reflects, and most importantly engages.  The exchange between cultures when one of my friends and Jake get to playing online is hilarious.  Like most male banter, it is largely profane and occasionally endearing.  To me, it serves as further evidence of Gee’s claims on identity and culture.  Like high school though (and I totally agree with Gee’s “pessimistic” description of America’s public education), I’m afraid most people are too fucked up to get the message.

Robb Garner – Week 6 Response

Sheridan’s (for some reason it feels more appropriate to use his first name) book continues to seem a thoughtful collection of prompts, ideas, and procedures that are saturated in theory, distinguished by results, and maintained by practicality.  I found the lines, “we have to reserve an equally prominent place in our syllabus for a serious effort at teaching and having student work on the formal academic literary paper,” especially relieving (p.157).  I found his method of giving only end-of-semester grades to be curious and thought-provoking.  For me, this is truly a quandary, a sort of mental battleground where the phalanxes of the progressive and standard push and shove to stalemate.  His use of the portfolio seems to be the only viable option in a response-laden and grade-absent assignment system, and I suspect the prospect of each paper supporting the other may indeed give students an even greater incentive than the individual grades themselves.  I think another problem with individual grades is there capacity to disenchant the student from the course.  This isn’t an exclusively English literature problem, but I think that when writing and literature are involved a poor grade can really influence a students’ participation in the class, both outside and in.  In my experience—which I admit comes more from my experience as a student than teacher—students that struggle with writing are especially vulnerable to surrender; throwing in the towel, saying, “this is stupid,” or “none of this actually matters,” is an easy way to reestablish their own self-worth and avoid the enormous task of learning to write.  Poor students—I feel like I should be politically correct here and say “students that receive poor marks”—are all fabulous mathematicians; if they get a good grade you can bet they’ll have figured out what grades they’ll need for the grade they want (or, in my case, what grade they need to pass).  If those grades seem impossible the student, who has already invested money into taking the course, is not likely to remain particularly engaged.  I think it is easy in our culture to harden our hearts against things we are not good at, things that lower our self-esteem: we’re taught that we need to have high self-esteem all the time, that we are all wonderful and equal in our wonderfulness—and in Academia I find a strange dichotomy between the traditional I / thou relationship of the student teacher, of the matriculated professional, and the mutant democratically neutered human that is bred in gradeschool.  Anyway, one thing that I’ll say about Sheridan’s portfolio method is that it demands a lot from the teacher.  Sheridan treats teaching writing / literature as his life’s calling, and I suspect he might agree, though in a more approachable language, that a teacher who is not so dedicated, who does not consider their job a thing of great personal and public importance to be something of a criminal.  The problem, I think, is not a lack of qualified, dedicated teachers, but a university’s willingness to pay them human salaries.  T.A.s are notoriously exploited individuals, and adjunct faculty is nothing more than companies hiring temps instead of employees so they don’t have to pay them benefits (which I get, I mean—fuck their health care).  The desire for me to speak on my own experience I this department is great, but it’ll have to wait until I get my degree and have the necessary credentials.  As it is, I wonder why there isn’t some massive movement in the composition world to have more God damn composition classes.  Writing across the curriculum sounds like a thing that was once a great idea and became compromised into Obamacare.  We have students that take one measly writing class and then must write essays in every class thereafter.  But do they practice writing in these classes?  Do they learn from their mistakes when their papers come back with grammar marks, the notation LEARN HOW TO USE A COMMA, and a grade?  Do professors who are tasked with writing across the curriculum know the pedagogy behind it—are they trained in teaching writing?  Do they give a shit about teaching writing?  I want someone to explain to me how writing across the curriculum is something more than the counterfeit currency of what almost every pedagogy we’ve covered wants to mint.

 

Response Week 5 – Robb Garner

Arlene Wilner’s “Confronting Resistance: Sonny’s Blues—and Mine,” asks us to think about something we don’t think about—and certainly don’t talk about—enough in pedagogical education: What, ethically speaking, is the role of education?  And what is the moral role of the teacher?  The problem is that these questions are weighed with a thousand prerequisites: Is education primarily an ethical construct?  Are teachers moral agents?  If education is ethically grounded, does that mean all education must be ethically oriented?  Do we teach ethics when we teach literature?  Can we teach ethics when we teach literature?  Are we morally compelled to teach ethics when we teach literature?  Conversely, can we not teach ethics when we teach literature?  And so on.  Unfortunately, Arlene Wilner’s essay, which was a clumsy mash of ethics, literacy, and critical thinking, only addressed these questions with via-negativa response of, ‘Not this way.’

As I see it, the big problem is that we don’t study ethics; we never think about morality critically.  We “learn” ethics from our parents, and not surprisingly, we spend our lives working off those teachings, those assumptions, our life experiences, and maybe one or two texts we read in a philosophy 101 class.  I don’t think Wilner ever took a philosophy class at any level, but in “Confronting Resistance” she suggests that we use our literary critical thinking skills in the literature classroom to enter a philosophical depth wrought with emotional, cultural, and experiential barricades (never mind that depths like this are hard enough to access when approached directly, in a dedicated study of ethics).  While there are a number of points I’d like to make, first and foremost it must be stated that this approach is ridiculous because before we can really talk about ethics we have to figure out what ethics is.  Where does morality come from?  That is the first question that has to be considered.  But that question alone takes longer than a university’s greater curriculum is willing to account for.  Ethically speaking, it seems that all education students ought to take a course on ethics, but even in this event the product would be questionable.  I spent three years of my philosophy major studying ethics and personally I’m comfortable discussing the ontology of morality (which, in the Aristotelian tradition, was the first and most major component of the branch of philosophy called Ethics and had roots in Plato’s early dialogue Euthyhro), but I don’t feel capable or comfortable of actively engaging students in an ethical discussion that will ultimately be severely—if not misleadingly—abbreviated.

Wilner’s example of the “homophobia” in one of her classrooms is a treatise on what happens when you gloss over fathomless depths.  First, she defines reading as “sympathetic engagement”—sympathy here being a sort of handicapped understudy of ethics and one of the few things our culture is comfortable believing in.  Then she engages students in a story which many of them believe to be indecent.  They do not believe they should be forced to read something that is outside of their moral code.  This moral code—which is not sympathetic or understanding of people that exist outside of it—is not in line with the morals “of the academy.”  Wilner than devises a number of assignments that loosen the “rebellious” students from their position so that, in the end, they can sympathize with the homosexual protagonist.  Of course, Wilner does not account for their prejudice as being a moral code.  The students go out of their way to tell her that they are not ‘homophobic’—they do not fear gay people—they “hate them.”  For Wilner, their hatred is not saturated in a belief of one thing which cannot allow another (say, what many evangelicals have turned Natural Law—a legitimate philosophic theory—into); it is not complicated, legitimate, and certainly not educated.  In coming to this immediate conclusion (which is what her society has propelled her to do) she ignores their cultural background, undermines their moral code, and fails to acknowledge their insight: That her ultra-sympathetic culture, which labels all people who look down on homosexuals as “homophobes,” portrays their prejudice as cowardice—not cultural casualty, lineage, or malice.

Of course, I’m not defending homophobia—but I am using my critical thinking skills to reflect on the narrative that Wilner presents.  Wilner says this of her students thinking abilities, “Without such supporting concepts, students naturally rely on habitual patterns of reaction, often shaped by unexamined emotions that encourage them to convert nuanced, complex relationships (among characters or ideas) into simplistic, distorted ones,” and it is hard to not be indignant.  She goes on to say, “In extreme cases, as in the rebellion in my class, students may simply refuse to do the reading if they do not like what it is “about.”

Finally—assuaging the indignation here—I think the point can be made a little more relatively to the matter at hand: How should we teach literature?  Wilner makes what I would call a confined cultural breakthrough with some of her students.  I believe that breakthrough won’t ever amount to much because the underlying issues—the real issues, not their materialization—have been wholly ignored, as have their potential implications.  And they have been necessarily ignored: Wilner doesn’t have the time or the capacity to treat ethical issues in a way that I think ethics ought to be discussed.  But at any rate, the breakthrough happened, and not much critical thinking coincided with it.  Getting a student to imagine what a homosexual might write to his mother does not demand a large amount of critical thinking skills.  Her response to the assignment series was that, “The students had taken a step toward enhanced literacy and an understanding of multiple perspectives that William G. Perry Jr. (1970: 54) persuasively argues is essential to moral maturity.”  But are we here to facilitate moral maturity or help students to think critically?  If we’re here to help student evolve morally then why don’t we have a class that is dedicated to it?  I’ll argue that critical thinking is necessary for moral maturity, but you have to have the critical thinking skills to really mature; her example was more giving a fish than teaching how to fish.  You can see this when she talks about the problems her students had with the highly literary task involved in Baldwin’s Sonny Sings the Blues.  The questions she asks her students about this story—“Why do you suppose the author chose to have his narrator begin here, at this point in his life? What is the effect of the flashbacks and of their placement at specific points in the narrative? More fundamentally, why does Sonny’s brother tell this story instead of Sonny himself, and how would the story be [End Page 190] different if told from Sonny’s point of view?”—are very much beyond what her students were asked in the other example.  It seems to me that teaching literature and, through it, critical thinking is hard enough as it is—better leave trying to force moral maturity and all its baggage to something other or later than 101.

Response to Fish – Robb Garner

I was going to avoid going into this, but I’ve spent too many hours mulling over it to not write about it:

Stanley Fish begins his essay with an example of lying to his students—telling them that something meaningless and arbitrary was in fact a religious poem of some value—and, after they respond according to this lie, concludes (Host Poc, I believe) that “acts of recognition, rather than being triggered by formal characteristics, are their source” (p. 270.)  It seems to me that this is true only if your “formal characteristics” are preceded by a source that you trust more than your own ability to recognize—like the suggestion of an instructor.  The difference, however, is ultimately mute because the recognition and what triggers the recognition both come from the same source.  The interesting thing is that Stanley Fish identifies there is only one way to recognize a poem: If someone (or something) tells you it’s a poem.  This is certainly true for anyone who studies poetry, who sees something called a “prose poem,” and thinks, “Sure, this is a poem.”  Why are “prose poems” poems?  Because whoever wrote them calls them a poem; whoever “created” the meaning is able to determine—or suggest with definitively—its most essential quality, the largest or most basic category it can fit into.  We take that overarching construct (it is because I say it is) and assimilate it into our own ontology of meaning, all of which is in keeping with our society at large: We determine a prose poem is a poem because others have determined it and have taught us about the determination-ontology of meaning.  Of course, one thing we don’t do in high school is study philosophy.  We don’t study how we interpret meaning and why—we’re just given it and that is enough.  I think if you look at education historically you’ll see a difference there.  But before I get too far off topic, I’ll disagree with Fish’s statement that “we create poetry (and assignments and lists)… through interpretive strategies that are finally not our own but have their source in a publicly available system of intelligibility” (p.274).  No doubt we create things within parameters established by such systems, but we do not create them through these systems.

Fish’s conclusion is that if we all agree we are programmed to think by our culture and the education prescribed by that culture, and that this holistic program comes down to us from our elders—and the only way to step out of our programming is to be lied to within the framework that defines the meaning of a “lie” and a “truth” (but which, because it is a creation of meaning rather than an access of it, is either falsity or verisimilitude)—than all our problems, our differences, will disappear, and we will be free to create within the framework we have been given (or rather free to push what meaning we create in pre-determined ways through the pre-fabricated holes of the pre-designed framework we have learned to varying degrees of a pre-calibrated exactness).  However, I remember being in high school and falling in love with Eliot’s Prufrock.  It’s meaning to me was manifest in the way it was something I experienced, took around with me in little memorized passages—“Shall I say I have gone at dusk through narrow streets / and watched lonely men in shirt-sleeves / leaning out of windows?”—and then a teacher asked us to dissect it, pull it apart by its seams and come to these realizations about the poem’s “meaning” by way of its associative innards.  Is this why we study poetry; is it nothing more than a mental exercise, a linguistic form of a logical puzzle?  Why do we care about poetry?  What is it that makes a poem important?  Fish’s essay is titled, “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One,” and, in his postulation, the title isn’t facetious; after all, by calling the names on the board a poem, and by treating these names as a poem (to an extent that many “real poems” have not been considered), Fish created a poem—he is a poet.

I’ll leave it at this: Let’s say Fish found himself conducting the same study in a 16th century classroom.  Let’s assume that in the 16th century the prevailing ontology of meaning was that a thing had a meaning in and of itself—that at least certain things were self evident.  Now my history education revolved around battles and kings—not philosophies—but it’s a somewhat safe assumption (Decartes famous line “I think therefore I am” was a 17th century challenge).  So we have Fish and his names on the board.  He tells the class “This is a religious poem,” and the class looks at Fish and says, “with all due respect sir, no, it fucking isn’t.”  The immediate response, that the 16th century students simply happen to come from a society and education that ascribes its own, different meaning to poetry, is an easy one.  But it’s the implication I’m interested in: The 16th century students wouldn’t have been duped.

Week 2 Response

Robb Garner, Week Two Response

I though the definition of reading as a “transaction between reader and text, where both play a role in the construction of meaning,” in Salvatori’s “The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty” was spot-on.  For me, the dynamism of language, how the meaning of words transform through context, use, and association is one of the primary elements of literature’s beauty and power.  I thought Salvatori’s strategy of using difficulty—or more exactly, what a student finds difficult—as an exploratory method of learning was another brilliant moment; it really spoke to my personal pedagogy and my experience as a student.

At university I studied history and philosophy; history required memorizing what I would define as stories (material and relationships) and then processing or defining the meaning of them; philosophy was much more complex and demanding.  Generally speaking, we had 3 essays per class, and we would start each essay by identifying a place in reading or in the discussion where we got lost, a passage we couldn’t quite grasp or a concept we continued to have trouble with.  The essay, then, used what we found difficult to expose what we did know and explore what we didn’t, and in the process evidenced our ability to think and the methodology of our thoughts.

These essays, however, were graded.  In Salvatori’s proposal, responses “are not graded because this work is considered exploratory” (p.10).  I doubt Salvatori is saying that, pedagogically, exploratory writing as a rule cannot be graded, but that seems to be in the implication.  It’s not a direct parallel, as philosophy is its own sort of undertaking, but its relevant enough; in one of my philosophy classes, for example, we spent two whole months working through Robert Frost’s poem “Love and a Question” alone.  I believe in grades and the grades I got for my exploratory writing as an undergrad.  Ungraded assignments tend to receive less effort at every level; grades themselves might be misleading reductions, but they are an essential part of our education, and it seems unwise to quantify some things (thus suggesting that they matter), and to not quantify others (especially when they really seem to be important).  Of course, grading explorations is difficult and is especially demanding on instructors; it isn’t something I imagine could be integrated into most schools.  On top of this, it has the potential to be controversial; at some level it suggests—or could suggest—that some students are better students than others (the explanation of how experts structure, retrieve quickly, and process complex systems of information in the reading “How People Learn” I found to be illuminating not only in the divide between novice and expert but also in a student’s development).  From my experience, I remember taking metaphysics and knowing that, unlike many of my classmates—and unlike other classes—there were things I wasn’t picking up on.  I couldn’t put things together, order them, or retrieve them at will.  I had even more trouble trying to explicate them.  I got Bs and Cs, and my teacher, through his comments, showed me where I was making my mistakes, suggested why I was having trouble processing the material and why I couldn’t utilize the conversations we had in class as I usually could.  It felt good to know my weakness—or “metacognition”—just as working through one’s difficulty, surrounding that difficulty with understanding, and discovering a way through it, or simply exploring the diversion created by it, is a good feeling as well.