Ingebretsen, Edward J. “When the Cave Is a Closet: Pedagogies of the (Re)Pressed.” In Lesbian and Gay Studies and the Teaching of English: Positions, Pedagogies, and Cultural Politics. Ed. William J. Spurlin. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000. 14-35. A gay professor at a Catholic university, Ingebretsen makes the point that teachers like him are probably the most monstrous of creatures in the heterosexist, patriarchal culture of the West. Being openly gay in the classroom means risking becoming a public and a political spectacle. This underscores how heterosexuality presumes and perpetuates its normality and its role as the enforcer of all kinds of behaviors it considers acceptable and non-acceptable. Allowing gays and lesbians to have a voice in the rarified space of the classroom is transgressive and potentially liberating. Useful within my own project for considering how my own sexuality could come into play as a composition professor and for how to prepare for groups of students who are like the trapped figures in Plato’s Cave and may not deal easily or well with the idea of the gay Other.
Khayatt, Didi. “Paradoxes of the Closet: Beyond the Classroom Assignment of In or Out.” In Inside the Academy and Out: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Studies and Social Action. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. 31-48. In this piece, Khayatt argues for professors to be open and upfront about their personal investments—particularly as regards sexuality—in the courses they teach. Being open about sexuality allows teachers to reinforce and support their students, be a role model, to participate in the ongoing project of unsettling the dominance of heterosexuality, to avoid the continuation of institutionalizing homophobia, and to, as leaders, put the self on the line. Useful for my project because Khayatt provides a cogent argument for being out in the classroom that challenges the neutrality Kopelson argues for in her piece and which makes me uncomfortable.
Kopelson, Karen. “Rhetoric on the Edge of Cunning; Or, The Performance of Neutrality (Re)Considered As a Composition Pedagogy for Student Resistance.” College Composition and Communication. 55.1 (2003): 115-146. Kopelson’s main argument in this piece is that composition professors should teach from what she describes as a position of neutrality—even if their pedagogical goals are far from being neutral. She feels such an approach to teaching will accomplish more as far as reaching resistant undergraduates than being open and explicit about where one stands on issues such as gender and sexuality in the classroom. Useful for my project because I do not agree with Kopelson’s idea of pedagogical subterfuge, even if it may be more effective in changing the minds of students for the better about all of the Others they will encounter in their lives.
Malinowitz, Harriet. “‘Truth’ or Consequences: The Lesbian or Gay Student in the Mainstream Writing Class.” Chapter Two of Textual Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Students and the Making of Discourse Communities. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995. 35-44. Given the undeniable and pervasive homophobia of Western society, the lesbian or gay student in the composition classroom faces myriad difficulties when faced with the charge of writing authentically about their lived experience. What, Malinowitz wonders, would help such students to feel comfortable and empowered to write about such things as coming out, one of the most singular and crucial experiences of gays and lesbians, yet one that is discounted entirely by normative heterosexuality? How can such students become empowered as writers? Advocates creating a “safe” classroom where gay and lesbian students can be themselves without fear of harm of any kind. Useful for my project in imagining what kind of a composition classroom I could create in which all students are welcome and encouraged to be authentic and real.
——. “Adrian O’Connor: ‘It’s a Social World.’” Chapter Eight of Textual Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Students and the Making of Discourse Communities. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995. 163-185. This chapter of Malinowitz’s book describes the experiences of a young gay man known as Adrian in the composition classroom that Malinowitz led at what she refers to as Cosmopolitan University. With the encouragement of his teacher and his fellow students, this writing course allowed Adrian to find his authentic voice and, perhaps more importantly, his identity as a young gay man. Useful to my project for revealing how my interventions as a gay composition professor might help my students at some point in the future.
Wallace, David L. “Out in the Academy: Heterosexism, Invisibility, and Double Consciousness.” College English. 65.1 (2002): 53-66. Focuses on three experiences Wallace, as a gay professor at Iowa Sate University, had facing heterosexism in the academy. For Wallace, these “institutional moments” led him “to speak or write as a gay academic in the service of beginning to make political interventions in dominant culture” (54). The most poignant of the three experiences involved gay students at ISU who were prevented from attending meetings of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Ally Alliance on campus because of commitments to a summer bridge program the administrators of would not find a way to accommodate. For Wallace, the administrators’ actions made it seem as if the students’ sexuality/identity did not matter. Though unsuccessful in getting the administrators to change their minds about the LGBTAA, Wallace did what he could to help the students. Useful for my project for providing examples of the kinds of interventions I could on behalf of my students once in the position to do so.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Proposal Draft / Questions for Conference Paper
One of the things I was most excited about when I entered graduate school was that, for the first time in my life, I was going to get to teach, to be the one at the head of the classroom. Four or five years later, I’m still just as excited about teaching in the university setting. But, increasingly, issues associated with sexuality have come into play as regards myself and my place and purpose as a college teacher. As a gay man, should I be at all concerned with the problematics of sexuality in relation to the fact that I am the one in the position of authority now in the classroom? In other words, am I obligated to, in effect, come out to my students just because I am a gay man? Should my sexuality have any effect on the education my students receive from me? Shifting the focus just a bit, do I have an obligation to other GLBQT people—past, present, and future—to be open and honest about my sexuality in the classroom? To do what I can as a gay educator in the college environment to change things, hopefully for the better? If I were to attempt to queer the composition classroom(s) I am responsible for, how would I go about doing so? What would the texts I use in the classroom look like? What methodologies and pedagogies would I employ? What would be the goals and purposes of a queer composition classroom?
Thursday, March 18, 2010
For 3/18/10 Readings
Whether focused on women, feminism, race, ESL, or the potentiality of world Englishes, this week’s articles bring the issue of the Other in the composition classroom to the forefront. As an Other myself because of my sexuality, these articles really resonated with me. Flynn takes on the idea of how composing may be fundamentally different from composing as a man, and this piece made me wonder if gay men might compose differently from straight men, straight women, bisexual individuals, lesbians, etc., and if there has been any kind of research done on such a topic. For Flynn, it seems as if women seek out connection and solidarity with other women in their compositions, whereas for men it’s about individuality and success, success specifically at the expense of others. It would, also, be interesting to study the essays I get from my composition students to see if gender differences reveal themselves as Flynn suggests.
Richie and Boardman, on the other hand, provide a brief history of feminism in the composition classroom and show us that, despite the strides made by feminists in the last 30 to 40 years, those strides often go unrecognized and reveal that there is still much more work to be done, particularly in the area of feminist disruption—disruption of the patriarchal, heterosexist paradigms that continue to dominate composition studies. All of which, as Richie and Boardman rightly insist, “require rhetorical skill” (604). Indeed, if you can’t present yourself in a certain way and make sure that you’re taken seriously, success ant disruption will prove elusive.
Royster’s article reminded/showed me that my first voice was not my own—it was the voice of the patriarchal/heterosexist power structure that in one insidious way or another, was always trying to keep me, as a gay man, quiet and marginalized. Overall, what Royster calls for is a more inclusive and accepting (for lack of a better term) way of teaching, learning, researching, and publishing that creates the circumstances for real learning of and about the Other—from the Other’s perspective and from the perspective of those in the dominant classes of Western society.
On the subject of ESL students . . . I want to begin with noting the fact that, here at UNLV, we as graduate assistants are not trained in how to work with such students. Having worked in an administrative capacity in the composition office for a couple of years, I know they do a good job of trying to get students with ESL needs into the composition courses offered by the ESL office (I can’t think of its actual name right off the top of my head). But, in my four years of teaching, I’ve had plenty of students for whom English was not their first language and I could tell they were struggling with writing. I would like to see much more provided to us as GTAs in terms of how to teach these students. But I doubt that will ever happen. Basically we are told that, if they’re in a regular composition class, they need to be held accountable to the same standards and expectations as those students for whom English is their first/primary/native language.
One of the things that I missed in this week’s readings had to do with people with disabilities. In almost every class I’ve taught here at UNLV in the last four years, I’ve had students with some kind of a disability that needed accommodations of one kind or another. For example, in one of the World Literature courses I’m teaching now, I have a student who is blind. Often times she is late to class because she gets lost on the way into CBC, but beyond that minor detail, she has serious difficulties with writing—in terms of amounts of writing, the coherency of writing, and with controlling the surface features of her writing. Once again, this is an area we as GTA’s get no support or instruction on how to deal with in our literature or composition classrooms. Am I just supposed to let my requirements and expectations go for this one student because she cannot meet them? What kind of an education is that for her? How has she gotten this far (she’s a senior) in her college education other than the fact that other professors have let her “slide.” This is an other kind of Other that most certainly warrants critical attention.
Richie and Boardman, on the other hand, provide a brief history of feminism in the composition classroom and show us that, despite the strides made by feminists in the last 30 to 40 years, those strides often go unrecognized and reveal that there is still much more work to be done, particularly in the area of feminist disruption—disruption of the patriarchal, heterosexist paradigms that continue to dominate composition studies. All of which, as Richie and Boardman rightly insist, “require rhetorical skill” (604). Indeed, if you can’t present yourself in a certain way and make sure that you’re taken seriously, success ant disruption will prove elusive.
Royster’s article reminded/showed me that my first voice was not my own—it was the voice of the patriarchal/heterosexist power structure that in one insidious way or another, was always trying to keep me, as a gay man, quiet and marginalized. Overall, what Royster calls for is a more inclusive and accepting (for lack of a better term) way of teaching, learning, researching, and publishing that creates the circumstances for real learning of and about the Other—from the Other’s perspective and from the perspective of those in the dominant classes of Western society.
On the subject of ESL students . . . I want to begin with noting the fact that, here at UNLV, we as graduate assistants are not trained in how to work with such students. Having worked in an administrative capacity in the composition office for a couple of years, I know they do a good job of trying to get students with ESL needs into the composition courses offered by the ESL office (I can’t think of its actual name right off the top of my head). But, in my four years of teaching, I’ve had plenty of students for whom English was not their first language and I could tell they were struggling with writing. I would like to see much more provided to us as GTAs in terms of how to teach these students. But I doubt that will ever happen. Basically we are told that, if they’re in a regular composition class, they need to be held accountable to the same standards and expectations as those students for whom English is their first/primary/native language.
One of the things that I missed in this week’s readings had to do with people with disabilities. In almost every class I’ve taught here at UNLV in the last four years, I’ve had students with some kind of a disability that needed accommodations of one kind or another. For example, in one of the World Literature courses I’m teaching now, I have a student who is blind. Often times she is late to class because she gets lost on the way into CBC, but beyond that minor detail, she has serious difficulties with writing—in terms of amounts of writing, the coherency of writing, and with controlling the surface features of her writing. Once again, this is an area we as GTA’s get no support or instruction on how to deal with in our literature or composition classrooms. Am I just supposed to let my requirements and expectations go for this one student because she cannot meet them? What kind of an education is that for her? How has she gotten this far (she’s a senior) in her college education other than the fact that other professors have let her “slide.” This is an other kind of Other that most certainly warrants critical attention.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
On Readings for 3/4/10
“The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction.” When I first read the title of Walter J. Ong’s article, I thought—naively, of course—that Ong’s argument was going to be that a writer’s audience, for all intents and purposes, does not exist and that’s why it’s a fiction. Very quickly, however, I realized what Ong meant with his pithy/catchy title is that a writer’s audience is always a construct, an imaginative creation on the part of a writer as well as on the part of an audience member in direct relation to the written work of said writer (as much as a writer tries to imagine and to write to a particular audience, members within that audience try to read the products of those efforts as they think the writer intended them to). Drawing on my own experience in the ENG 101 composition classroom at UNLV, the basic instruction we give our students is that their audience extends beyond the professor to include college-educated people with an interest in the topic of their essays. I have serious doubts that—no matter what we tell them or write out on our assignment sheets—students ever believe that anyone other than their professor (and maybe one or two of their peers) is going to read and/or have an interest in the essays they have to produce in composition. And in ENG 102, imagining/creating an audience only goes a step or two further because we do try to teach students that they need to account for the fact that they may be dealing with audiences who—though college-educated and interested in the subjects of their essays—may also be disinclined to agree or even downright hostile toward the point of view or argument students are trying to make in their own works. In both the 101/102 situations, the audience always remains a construct of the student writer’s imagination and, hence, as much of a fiction as Ong suggests.
In “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy,” Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford continue the conversation about audience and how the idea of audience impacts the pragmatics of teaching and learning composition. If I understood Ede and Lunsford correctly, an Audience Addressed is a known commodity, i.e. knowledge of an “audiences attitudes, beliefs, and expectations is not only possible (via observation and analysis) but essential” when it comes to writing in the composition classroom (156). The problem, for Ede and Lunsford, with this model of audience and writer interaction, is that it relies too heavily on audience response (rather than writer agency) for judgment of the success or failure of a writer’s work. The phrase Audience Invoked, on the other hand, is more in line with Ong’s idea of a writer’s audience always being a fiction: writers, from the perspective of an invoked audience, are always trying to figure out who makes up the audience of their writing productions and what are their wants, needs, desires, expectations, etc. as readers. Ede and Lunsford go on to propose an audience that is shaped by the demands of the rhetorical situation at hand—as such, an audience can be addressed or invoked. What is most important is the writer who ought to be “guided by a sense of purpose and by the particularities of a specific rhetorical situation” and who “establishes the range of potential roles an audience may play” in reading her/his work (166).
For me, audience has always been a rather shadowy concept that—despite having taught in the composition classroom for a few years now—I feel like I have no idea how to teach to my students in a way that will allow them to come to a comprehensive understanding of the concept that they can use/rely on as they continue their educational and professional endeavors. As a graduate student specializing in Shakespeare studies, my idea of audience when I write—in most instances, at any rate—is more influenced by the ideas of intertextuality and discourse communities that James E. Porter discusses in “Interextuality and Discourse Community.” When I’m writing about a Shakespearean play, I have to be aware of the fact that 400 years (give or take) of criticism and ideas precede me and my work—and I have to acknowledge that mass of knowledge and insight in the way I write/what I say both explicitly and implicitly, or else my work is never going to be taken seriously by the community of Shakespeareans with which I am involved with professionally. So, for example, if I’m writing a character study of Iago from Othello, I need to be aware that character study within the larger enterprise of Shakespeare studies got its start with A.C. Bradley in the early 20th century AND that character study has, in the main, fallen out of favor in the contemporary critical world where Shakespeare is concerned. But how do you teach such ideas—in general or in specific circumstances—to undergraduates who are not yet full members (if you will) of such discourse communities—especially, for example, here at UNLV where our ENG 101 course focuses on teaching student how to write generic essays like the narrative, the definition, the explanation, the problem-solution, and the researched argument essay? Except for the latter, how can we make discourse and their situatedness within discourse make sense to our students at the undergraduate level?
Bruffee, in “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind,’” expands on the idea of larger, organizing fields of discourse our undergraduate students are becoming involved with as members of the university community. Seeing these discourses as more encompassing conversations that mankind has been having for eons, Bruffee argues that students working in collaborative environments and situations—as opposed to individually—enhances learning because it mimics not only how things work in the “real” world, but also how “real” academics work with one another in academe. I have a very negative bias against just about anything associated with collaborative learning, and I can’t imagine why students wouldn’t, too—given that grades are always individual results, not collective results. Also, drawing on my experiences, again, in the UNLV ENG 101/102 classroom, I’ve found that students engagement with collaborative learning as regards peer reviewing his lackluster if not almost hostile. Most students give little more than a half-hearted effort to truly responding to the papers of their peers which, as the instructor, makes it seem like such a collaborative learning exercise is not at all beneficial.
Trimbur, in “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning,” voices some of my other concerns as regards collaborative learning. Of course, Trimbur admits he’s not the first to say it, but he does summarize what others have said very well: that collaborative learning can—if not done right—can create circumstances in which group think becomes a hegemonic force that silences the voices of students who disagree with prevailing views. As such, Trimbur goes on to argue for a collaborative learning pedagogy that courts dissensions or dissensus. Once again, as a student and as a professor, collaborative learning in whatever form makes me nervous and I would want to shy away from it.
Johnson-Eilola and Selber’s article, “Plagiarism, Originality, Assemblage,” was an interesting read, to say the least. I liked how they tried to link things from architecture and web design to composition pedagogies which, in their opinion, are way too Romantic in that they insist on the perpetuation of the student-as-lone-genius-producing-original-work myth. If, for example, you look at any of the housing tracts I’ve seen sprout up just in my lifetime here in the Las Vegas metropolitan area as well as all over Southern California, the design of the houses is depressingly the same in terms of styles and stucco colors, etc. And, since last December, I’ve gotten hooked on the ABC daytime drama One Life to Live, which, at this time, is featuring a gay love story that is being very well-told. Of course, I don’t have time to watch full episodes of One Life to Live every single day, so I’ve turned to watching YouTube clips instead. A number of the posters to YouTube have taken to posting only those scenes from each episode that involve Kyle and Oliver from the gay love story. In fact, one poster has created new title sequences for these compilation clips and called them One Life to Live: The Kyle and Oliver Story. All of this is assemblage in exactly the way Johnson-Eilola and Selber talk about it. Why can't students do something similar in their compositions?
In “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy,” Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford continue the conversation about audience and how the idea of audience impacts the pragmatics of teaching and learning composition. If I understood Ede and Lunsford correctly, an Audience Addressed is a known commodity, i.e. knowledge of an “audiences attitudes, beliefs, and expectations is not only possible (via observation and analysis) but essential” when it comes to writing in the composition classroom (156). The problem, for Ede and Lunsford, with this model of audience and writer interaction, is that it relies too heavily on audience response (rather than writer agency) for judgment of the success or failure of a writer’s work. The phrase Audience Invoked, on the other hand, is more in line with Ong’s idea of a writer’s audience always being a fiction: writers, from the perspective of an invoked audience, are always trying to figure out who makes up the audience of their writing productions and what are their wants, needs, desires, expectations, etc. as readers. Ede and Lunsford go on to propose an audience that is shaped by the demands of the rhetorical situation at hand—as such, an audience can be addressed or invoked. What is most important is the writer who ought to be “guided by a sense of purpose and by the particularities of a specific rhetorical situation” and who “establishes the range of potential roles an audience may play” in reading her/his work (166).
For me, audience has always been a rather shadowy concept that—despite having taught in the composition classroom for a few years now—I feel like I have no idea how to teach to my students in a way that will allow them to come to a comprehensive understanding of the concept that they can use/rely on as they continue their educational and professional endeavors. As a graduate student specializing in Shakespeare studies, my idea of audience when I write—in most instances, at any rate—is more influenced by the ideas of intertextuality and discourse communities that James E. Porter discusses in “Interextuality and Discourse Community.” When I’m writing about a Shakespearean play, I have to be aware of the fact that 400 years (give or take) of criticism and ideas precede me and my work—and I have to acknowledge that mass of knowledge and insight in the way I write/what I say both explicitly and implicitly, or else my work is never going to be taken seriously by the community of Shakespeareans with which I am involved with professionally. So, for example, if I’m writing a character study of Iago from Othello, I need to be aware that character study within the larger enterprise of Shakespeare studies got its start with A.C. Bradley in the early 20th century AND that character study has, in the main, fallen out of favor in the contemporary critical world where Shakespeare is concerned. But how do you teach such ideas—in general or in specific circumstances—to undergraduates who are not yet full members (if you will) of such discourse communities—especially, for example, here at UNLV where our ENG 101 course focuses on teaching student how to write generic essays like the narrative, the definition, the explanation, the problem-solution, and the researched argument essay? Except for the latter, how can we make discourse and their situatedness within discourse make sense to our students at the undergraduate level?
Bruffee, in “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind,’” expands on the idea of larger, organizing fields of discourse our undergraduate students are becoming involved with as members of the university community. Seeing these discourses as more encompassing conversations that mankind has been having for eons, Bruffee argues that students working in collaborative environments and situations—as opposed to individually—enhances learning because it mimics not only how things work in the “real” world, but also how “real” academics work with one another in academe. I have a very negative bias against just about anything associated with collaborative learning, and I can’t imagine why students wouldn’t, too—given that grades are always individual results, not collective results. Also, drawing on my experiences, again, in the UNLV ENG 101/102 classroom, I’ve found that students engagement with collaborative learning as regards peer reviewing his lackluster if not almost hostile. Most students give little more than a half-hearted effort to truly responding to the papers of their peers which, as the instructor, makes it seem like such a collaborative learning exercise is not at all beneficial.
Trimbur, in “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning,” voices some of my other concerns as regards collaborative learning. Of course, Trimbur admits he’s not the first to say it, but he does summarize what others have said very well: that collaborative learning can—if not done right—can create circumstances in which group think becomes a hegemonic force that silences the voices of students who disagree with prevailing views. As such, Trimbur goes on to argue for a collaborative learning pedagogy that courts dissensions or dissensus. Once again, as a student and as a professor, collaborative learning in whatever form makes me nervous and I would want to shy away from it.
Johnson-Eilola and Selber’s article, “Plagiarism, Originality, Assemblage,” was an interesting read, to say the least. I liked how they tried to link things from architecture and web design to composition pedagogies which, in their opinion, are way too Romantic in that they insist on the perpetuation of the student-as-lone-genius-producing-original-work myth. If, for example, you look at any of the housing tracts I’ve seen sprout up just in my lifetime here in the Las Vegas metropolitan area as well as all over Southern California, the design of the houses is depressingly the same in terms of styles and stucco colors, etc. And, since last December, I’ve gotten hooked on the ABC daytime drama One Life to Live, which, at this time, is featuring a gay love story that is being very well-told. Of course, I don’t have time to watch full episodes of One Life to Live every single day, so I’ve turned to watching YouTube clips instead. A number of the posters to YouTube have taken to posting only those scenes from each episode that involve Kyle and Oliver from the gay love story. In fact, one poster has created new title sequences for these compilation clips and called them One Life to Live: The Kyle and Oliver Story. All of this is assemblage in exactly the way Johnson-Eilola and Selber talk about it. Why can't students do something similar in their compositions?
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