reflections on tyca-pnw

Yesterday Sara Jameson and I presented our presentation, “A Compass for the Composition Classroom: Conversing and Consuming in Cyberspace Communities,” at the TYCA-PNW conference, where we asked participants to post to the TYCA-PNW blog. I’m hoping the blog has the potential to take off and be able to be a resource and communication place for teachers in the Pacific Northwest. I’m also hoping that some of the participants were enthused enough, or were introduced to blogging enough, to begin to blog, either personally or in the classroom.

It was a fun presentation to prepare for, too. Sara and I co-authored our works together on Writely, and then on google docs after Google changed the website. It was really fun to collaborate, to write together simultaneously, to see the exciting new potentials of new technologies. I’ll admit to being frustrated at times, to having to figure out how to meet both of our writing needs and learning style needs. Collaborating in writing is definitely a case of negotiation and listening. We didn’t have any major problems, though, and Sara and I work well together.

The conference yesterday was great — I wish I had had a chance to go on Friday for the round-table talks and the open mic. It would have been interesting.

Dr. Cheryl Glenn of Penn State gave the opening keynote address, and her talk was very engaging and moving, I thought. She noted some of the challenges of education (college becoming a market-place, that school reinforces social differences, and our violent culture) and her solution: re-imagination: we must re-imagine our physicality so that we can re-imagine intellectually. We need to create safe classrooms so that students are physically and emotionally safe, so that we can push them and challenge them. She cited Henry Giroux and his call for us to engage, to take risks. We also had a chance to talk to Dr. Glenn during a session in which we held a great discussion about class issues, politics, and change. It was amazing. I really try to pay attention to the way people talk to each other, and I was very pleased with the way Dr. Glenn listened and asked questions.

I went to two other talks, one on using visual media in the composition classroom, and the other on the tensions between using popular culture and using “great works” in the composition classroom. The presenter argued that we are told students need to start with reading popular culture and then move into reading great works, but unfortunately, we hardly ever move away from popular culture in the classroom. Additionally, students complain that popular culture isn’t challening enough, and she felt that it often didn’t lead to as good of writing as when students read harder stuff.

I had a few problems with her talk, but I didn’t get a chance to ask her questions because right as I was raising my hand, the moderator stopped us because of time. Other people raised similar questions, though, that began to get at where I wanted to ask. My first problem with her presentation was that she didn’t define her terms: popular culture, high culture, and Great Works. Some of the works she cited as either high culture or Great Works were popular culture at the time of their creation or are now: Fast Food Nation, Shakespeare, Sigmund Freud, Jonathan Swift, Charles Dickens.

I think if she defined her terms better, her argument might have held more ground. As it was, everythinge was too nebulous. Actually, I think that if she defined her terms better, her argument might have fallen in on itself. What is the difference between high culture and popular culture: a distinction that someone’s aesthetics decided it was hard, it was of higher quality, it was “deeper.” This someone’s aesthetics, even when the text at hand is by a minority, is often the aesthetics of middle class straight white men.

I would propose that instead we call all this culture what it is: Mass Culture, culture that is mass produced, mass disseminated, and mass consumed. As I told Sara as we drove back from Salem, from here we can cease to ask if a text is a “hard enough” text and istead ask, Whose interests are being expressed in this text? Who gains power through the reading of this text? Who loses power? How does this text subvert or reinforce power structures? How have people subverted this text to change the power structures built in its use? What are the multiple ways of reading this text that allow us to understand its purpose.

The presenter made a most egregious error in my opinion: she repeatedly called pop culture “trivial.” I do not understand how texts read by (listened to, viewed by) millions of people are trivial. These texts are used daily to reinforce or subvert power structures. These texts are a whole lot more than trivial: they are part of the way we make our world. These texts are, according to the presenter, too easy to read. Yes, they can be. I would argue, as Robert Scholes does, that it does not matter what we teach, but rather how we teach it, and implicit in that is how we read it. Of course popular culture is easy to read if you let it to be, if we continue the mind-numbing reading that doesn’t call for critical attention to the power structures built into the use of a text. Shakespeare can be easy to read, too: It’s when we choose to do hard reading of texts, not reading of hard texts, that we can actually become critical readers.