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12/26/2004 Archived Entry: "The Unbearable Lightness of Pedagogy"
The Unbearable Lightness of Pedagogy
Taken from Kundera’s Dictionary of Misunderstood Words in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an update for the discipline in honor of the ending year. I.e. a top ten (without reaching ten) countdown of disciplinary misunderstood words; the Yellow Dog Remix.
Grading. Academic blogs love to complete the semester with odes to grading pains. “Finally!” “Students get worse every semester.” “I’m so busy grading.” The grade, the degree, the level, of complaints rise among the most disappointed pedagogues. Amid all the kvetching, though, no one stops to grade themselves: quality of instruction (F), innovative teaching (F), interesting assignments with context and reason to do (F).
MLA. Not too much modern about the Modern Language Association, its history rooted in disciplinary identity as well as national identity (literature and language mark the nation state, a late concept for American culture). Today’s identity is cyber, not literary. To be fully modern, the MLA needs to include scripts and code. The Society for HTML. The Organization of Perl Studies.
Plagiarism. Imagine Madlib in a composition classroom. Imagine Picasso claiming Las Meninas as his own. Imagine Robert Johnson trying to write “Traveling Riverside Blues.” “But these are artistic practices,” plagiarism police argue. “They are not exemplary of academic writing.” Ok. You just proved my point.
Professional Writing. Why is the university set up for the creation of a professional class? Literacy. But, as many show, one does not have to be immersed in literacy (or at least, print literacy) to be professional. Fast Food Nation’s strongest point is that none of the early innovators in fast food and franchising had college degrees or even completed high school. Writing instruction is obsessed with being professional. Yet, its vision of professionalism often is a mythology, an assumption taken for granted as truth. The mythology of genre (essays, memos, usability) and “purpose” overcomes and prevents knowledge creation. It’s a problematic As if situation: as if professional discourse has nothing to do with rhetoric or invention.
Blog. Has come to be confused with emancipation. The new media faux pas. We saw it in hypertext, too. Blog is but a genre, a space, one – of many – ways to create writing online. Its usefulness gets shadowed by infatuation (I BLOG YOU BLOG WE BLOG). Missionary zeal over rhetorical output. The critics love it because it’s easy to use the zeal as cause for dismissal: “Ah, it’s just a fad. What will be the next big thing?” In the meantime, even more so than was the case with hypertext and web page construction, millions of these writing spaces come to live across the Web, connecting and sharing information in all kinds of interesting, boring, profound, provocative, collective ways. Everyone gets to participate. Except students, of course.
Replies: 1 Comment
I just imagined Muad'Dib in the composition classroom. He's teaching using the voice.
Posted by Jonathan @ 12/27/2004 11:21 PM EST
