• Konrad Glogowski posts about his own voice in blogs while teaching 8th grade. I found his post really interesting in regards to personal voice and identity presentation/representation. An excerpt:

What I am really concerned about, however, is my own voice. For the past three years, my three successive grade eight classes enjoyed blogging and created successful and engaging blogging communities. Most of the time, this development took place without me. While I certainly encouraged my bloggers, discussed their work in class, and posted comments to involve my students in instructional conversations, I have always been absent as a person. This year, I want things to be different.

This year, I want my personal voice to be present in the community. I will, of course, continue to be present as Mr.Glogowski, the grade eight Language Arts teacher. I will be present in my didactic and supportive role of an educator, of a classroom teacher who guides and explains. At the same time, I want to be present as Konrad Glogowski, the human being who has his own interests and views. I want to be present as an individual, not an individual reduced to one role.

In other words, I want the students to see me as yet another blogger in their community, as someone whose reason for being there is not only to support and instruct but also to learn. To learn from and with my students.

• Via Blogging Pedagogy, among many others, Google has made a video explaining Google Docs:

• Clancy posted some interesting images on Kairosnews with visual representations of online arguments. Good for discussion prompts. Here’s an example:

I have one more thing to say about the kind of critique I tried to fashion [in Possible Lives]. Academic training is agonistic; graduate study instills in us the penchant for critique, and the disciplinary tools to do it. More generally, Western intellectual life is energized by attack and counterattack — just read the letters section of a magazine like The Nation. It is less common — and perhaps more difficult — to find shared concerns or seek collaborative resolution. (303)

Rose, Mike. An Open Language: Selected Writing on Literacy, Learning, and Opportunity. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006.

found via: Lindquist, Julie. “Review: Looking Back at the Road Ahead.” College English 70.1 (Sept. 2007): 70-78.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

In recent years, renegade rhetoricians from Cal State Fullerton and other underdog schools have clobbered debate kingpins from Harvard and UC Berkeley with a hodgepodge of unorthodox methods known as “performance debating.”

Instead of relying on scholarly research to foil opponents, the teams employ guerrilla tactics such as reading from Dr. Seuss, impersonating pirates or ballroom dancing with a chair.

“People call us the terrorists of debate,” says Fullerton student Brenda Montes.

The goal of performance debate is threefold: Knock rivals off stride, impress judges with creative forms of argument and open the heavily white-male field to new voices.

The methods have sparked an uproar. Purists say the gimmicks are wrecking a noble tradition. But supporters insist the techniques are returning the art of persuasion to its roots.

[...]

“Traditional debaters say the only evidence that matters is library research,” he said. “We say personal experience is equally important.” Bruschke points out that Aristotle ranked emotion equal to logic as a tool in seeking truth.

[...]

Performance teams “have pretty much started to ruin traditional debate and what it offers students educationally,” said Ken Sherwood, director of forensics at Los Angeles City College.

In the past, debaters had to research both sides of an issue. “It taught students there’s always another side and it forced them to understand the opposition,” Sherwood said. “If you do that, you’re better able to defend your own perspective.”

In contrast, performance squads focus on personal stories and theatrics that often have little to do with the topic, he said.

Defenders of alternative tactics say they’re simply trying to “level the playing field” against students who have been honing debate skills since high school, often at elite private campuses.

But Sherwood disputes the idea that underprivileged students need gimmickry to compete. “My program has brought more people from disadvantaged backgrounds into debate than Louisville, Fullerton and Long Beach combined,” he said.

Harvard’s Perkins said it’s true that performance debating can shortchange students on research skills, but he still admires the movement. “It has strengthened the game and made it more demanding,” Perkins said.

At a recent Malibu contest, Brett Beeler of Cal State Fullerton stopped mid-sentence in a debate and asked teammate Caitlin Gray for a document.

As she rummaged around, Beeler impatiently left the podium and whispered heatedly at her. The tiff escalated, and suddenly he slapped her.

The judge of the debate came unglued. “You need to leave right now!” he shouted at Beeler.

But the slap was an act — a way to breathe life into the otherwise dry debate topic, a court case involving domestic violence.

“I really did believe it was an incident of domestic abuse,” said the judge, Orion Steele, a professor at the University of Redlands. “It took me a good half-hour to cool down.” Then he awarded the victory to Fullerton.

Each of Fullerton’s two-person debate squads uses a strategy tailored to individual members’ backgrounds.

Puja Chopra and Parija Patel, both of Indian descent, sit down and meditate in debates to symbolize that arguing over legislation is pointless because true change must come from within.

Another duo cranks up a stereo and delivers arguments with homespun rap lyrics. When opponents complained that rap wasn’t an acceptable way to debate, Fullerton countered with a swipe at speed-talking. “The way you talk is understood by fewer than 2,000 people in America,” debater Dale Morrison said. Rap has a better chance of influencing listeners, he said.

Some schools get so swept up challenging Fullerton’s tactics that they forget to rebut the team’s arguments, Bruschke said. He estimates 10% of college squads use performance tactics.

When performance teams face each other, things can get pretty weird. Long Beach State once faced two women from Concordia College in Minnesota who stripped down to G-strings and talked about reclaiming their bodies from objectification by men.

The all-male California team couldn’t get past the distraction. “Their brains left them,” said Neesen, their coach.

Another contest pitted a Fort Hays student dancing with a chair against a Northwestern team reading the script of “Dr. Strangelove.” The topic was federal control of Native American land.

“It was a wild debate,” Shanahan said. “Strangelove” prevailed.

Part of a performance squad’s success depends on the element of surprise. “It’s classic guerrilla warfare,” Bruschke said. “Your tactics have to constantly change or you lose your advantage to superior force.”

Shanahan once judged a match in which a team used nine minutes of silence to signify that African Americans had no voice on a policy matter.

“It was powerful,” Shanahan said. But when other schools began copying the ploy, it wore thin. “After you hear it 15 or 20 times, it becomes passe,” he said. “The bar gets raised.”

Ultimately, the endless quest for novelty could doom the new form.

“It’s getting to the point where it’s hard to do something that really challenges the boundaries, because the boundaries have been all but eliminated,” Shanahan said. “It’s hard to say where things will go next.”

I lean towards calling this a “good thing” because it’s opening up the debate style that usually favors masculinist argumentation (which privileges those from middle class white upbringing and favors men over women because of socialization). While I think it might be problematic that some of these performances don’t address the issue, I think it’s great that young rhetoricians are realizing that there are different ways to communicate than through a logical 3 reasons with support style method. The fact that narrative is being used is amazing, and that bodies are being incorporated into argument is really cool. As Iris Marion Young has pointed out, our traditional beliefs in a democratic deliberative democracy privileges certain people whose education and background have helped them adopt the norms of debate. If we’re to truly open up the public sphere to be inclusive of many different voices, we have to change what we value (and what we desire) in argumentation/discourse. That’s why I read this and think it’s exciting and a “good thing.”

Wednesday night, after a short week of classes before Thanksgiving, I sat in Bombs Away, one of my favorite bars to sit and chat with others in. Two other English department GTAs and I were holding a lively and hopeful discussion about what we were doing at GTAs and as future teachers. We lamented our theses, how there was little “so what“ to them because no one would read them. I countered that we could use them to learn for ourselves, use them to earn privilege (our degrees) and then continue to educate others, create spaces for discussion, create spaces for critical thinking, and also write and engage with the world in more engaged ways than a thesis sitting in Valley Library. My take on all this was informed, of course, by Habermas and Young. I have really begun liking both of them.

But what happened next really sold me on Iris Marion Young’s work. I felt like I was honestly in a salon, holding discussions about gender, graduate school, social change, sexuality, and so much more and coming to agreement and similar terms in a bar — if only more people were there. I also felt like I was learning more in that hour and a half conversation than I had in most of my classes (perhaps only this one and a few others have been as engaging). But then a friend of ours sat down, and the way we communicated changed. It wasn’t bad at first — just different. But then she called a professor of ours an “insecure pansy,“ and I said, “I’d like you to reconsider the use of the word pansy,“ explaining the way it is used to categorize feminine men and make a strict definition of masculinity — that, and it used a feminizing word, akin to pussy that equates feminine characteristics to negative characters. Also, I stated that the word had been used against me and was insulting to me, and quite possibly to other men in the bar.

I soon found that our friend and I were engaged in an ever-increasing performance of agonism, going back and forth, the stakes and argumentative style becoming more structured as we went. I noticed that my friend Sarah was not able to get a word in edge-wise because she is not as aggressive a communicator, and it became very uncomfortable as our friend made her last argument backed up by claims, furthermores and therefores, and insistent movements of her hands. I said, “I have to stop here because I am uncomfortable. I am uncomfortable because we are still tossing around the word pansy and even the n-word [which was used in comparison] and because our conversation is increasingly agonistic [a word which I realized was a mistake and jargonistic when she stated she didn't know what that meant].“ I’ve always wanted to value narrative and other forms of argument, but I realized that what was being valued in that instant was an academic-agonistic style of argumentation that was very off-putting to me, to Sarah, and I think to our friend Nate as well, who remained silent throughout the debate. I think the word debate is accurate here instead of dialogue because the way we talked continued down the road of back-and-forth claims and defense. It appears that the type of discourse we valued in order to make meaning was not the type of discourse that is used by the majority of people, and the type of discourse that I wanted to value. I don’t know where our friend learned to argue like this — whether it is cultural (she is an immigrant), from her family, or from her years of schooling — but it became a style that was used, even unintentionally, to exclude those who were not versed in it.

I’ve read parts of Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe, which pretty much argues that we are in an argument culture and that we should explicitly teach our students what the conversations in our fields are and how to argue within those conversations. He takes to task Deborah Tannen in her book The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue because she argues against polemics, but does so in a way that Graff thinks is polemical. I haven’t read her book, but from what I am beginning to understand of Young, it appears that Graff is engaged in the type of deliberative democracy that Young notes is exclusionary: one of debate among those who can debate. Graff of course wants to include more people in that debate, but it seems it is not through valuing different types of discourses, but rather, through teaching more people to construct an academic-style argument. It is akin to saying: you will be smarter and more well-respected and listened to if you argue the way we do, and not saying, as I think it should, we should deconstruct the way we listen and the ways of speaking/writing we value so that we can include those who deserve to be included.

I’ve been interested for some time in listening and how we can listen more to each other. I think as long as we are engaged in this style of I must prove my point, we won’t be a listening culture. We stop listening in order to formulate our next argument. We aren’t interested in changing ourselves, but in changing others. We cannot give time to others to make arguments indifferent types of discourse, and, perhaps worst of all, we have no time to listen to suffering and pain because it is not part of the logical ways in which we argue. When I say, “What you say hurts me,“ and you do not listen because I have not properly defended an argument, you have not listened to me.

Of course, this brings me back to the body, and changing the way we desire and feel. Does this require more compassion? Does it require more attunement with our bodies to what others are saying and doing? Do we need to refocus with our eyes on what is going on around us and how so many people aren’t included in the conversations? Do we need to change where we stand: go and hold these conversations not in city halls and courthouses, but in ghettos and on farms? I’ll be happy when we all stop and say, “What I am hearing you say is…“ — a form, I think, of Young’s “Greeting,“ a recognition of the other person’s experiences, but I don’t think this can merely happen by telling people they must start doing it. I think it can only happen through emotive changes in society.

It’s hard to imagine that this much good talking could all happen in one day…

I was particularly moved by Sara and my conversation with Chris this morning. It was such a great way to start off the day, and I felt so excited for the way Chris talked about using blogging in the classes he teaches. He told us that he felt that conventional academic writing is often not very good, so he tries to break through that by attempting freewriting and student journals. However, journals became like busywork, and they were often sloppy, uninteresting, and cumbesome. However, blogs were able to replace journals, but were often more interesting, polished-looking, and public. Students were in what Chris calls a “mid-place,” a place in which they are thinking aloud in a public space.

One thing that Chris mentioned today that I was really excited to hear was that he felt he would rather live with the problem of messiness (what if someone flames on the blog, particularly in the Bible as Lit class? what if control is “lost”?) in order to get to dialogue and openenss and good ideas. He notes that the blog is a chance to go home with what you freewrite or discuss in class and contemplate it outside of class.

Chris also said something really good about place or location, which I immediately connected to the theme of the TYCA-PNW conference this weekend, but it appears my notetaking wasn’t as good as I would like.

Overall a great day. The coffee shop I’m at closes in seven minutes; I have been going nearly non-stop since 6:15 a.m., when I woke up and immediatley opened up a book to read some Herbert Marcuse. I think I’m gonna go home and do more homework.

EDIT: Chris mentioned a Parker Palmer quote: “to teach is to create a space in which the community of truth is practiced” (90).

I wonder if this can’t be applied to argumentation. Perhaps the reason some arguments are overly agonistic is because the arguer views his adversary in an I-it manner instead of an I-thou manner? I’m not sure, and it’s an idea that just popped into my head as I was reading some Quintilian (which, I begin to ask myself, how closely am I paying attention to Quintilian’s text?). So, if we view our “adversaries,” or those who agree with us in an I-thou manner, would be get more listening, less agonism?