Technology in Education

This post has nothing to do with our reading. It is instead about our presentations and what I learned. I had a lot of fun during our presentations and thank you to all that brought all the goodies-I was wired all week. I must admit that when I realized that we had to maintain a blog I was apprehensive, to say the least, because I did not feel confident in using technology. And then when we were given our presentation assignment and had to use technology I became more afraid. But when Gina presented and she did her video I felt sort of relaxed; it was short, to the point and was interesting and much more important, it seemed easy. Well, I went home and decided to make a film (thanks for the inspiration Gina). I learned how to use my webcam (but unfortunately did not learn how to use the audio) and got to work. I had a lot of fun making the video and kept wanting to add more stuff to it but that would have been to wild; to much MELUS to handle.

The journal itself was very eye opening. Like mentioned in my presentation I had never considered Anzaldua's borderland theory to apply to anything but Chicano/a culture, even though her definition addresses that blending of cultures. And so while reading the articles I was surprised by how much her work was cited in article after article. One article that was eye opening was “Charting the Past and Present: Iranian Immigrant and Ethnic Experience through Poetry” by Peris M. Karim.

This article is about Iranian poetry and how it relates to Iranian identity in the United States. It is a perfect example of living on the border. The author describes how the Iranian community felt they had to change their identity after the hostage event of 1978 (I think). They went from being proud of being Iranian to calling themselves Persian and then having to deal with the consequences.

Using the webcam and learning about border identity applied to different cultures, made the presentation easier.


I have attached the puppet presentation that started it all.

Text vs. Document

"To find flesh and blood is the ultimate purpose of reading and its sophisticated partner, interpretation."(McGann 161)

What caught me by surprise in this essay was mostly the first section of the "document", to take from Jerome McGann, in which, as demonstrated in the quote above, he requires finding life, literally, as part of the process of interpretation of a document.

He separates text from document and makes a strict and important distinction by stating, "For unlike texts, documents in fact do often have real holes in them, or are otherwise marked by marks of their actual historical passage (161)." McGann proposes that in order to be able to fully interpret a text, we must first see it as a document; recognize it's history, who wrote it, why it was written and what the physical journey of that document has been in order to interpret it.

As students of English literature we are asked to separate the speaker or narrator from the text, that this will not assist in interpretation. However, relating writer to narrative or in this case scholarly work, I have always argued, and in accordance to McGann is necessary for an accurate, or accurate as can be interpretation.

Because documents are not simply print words; at a specific moment in time, in a particular part of the country or planet, there was actually someone thinking, at a desk or some other physical place, about what to write, and more importantly why or for what purpose to write and probably thinking about a specific audience. All these components separate a text, a bloodless fleshless artifact, from a living breathing document. McGann goes on to explain his reasons for wanting to know answers to the above questions,

Because interpretation is a social act --a specific deed of critical reflection made in a concert of related moves and frames of reference (social, political, institutional) that constitute the present as an interpreted inheritance from a past that has been fashioned by other interpreting (161)

I completely agree with him.

Homework Assignment

In this week's episode of English 609 we found ourselves doing page upon page of homework using the trusty "They Say/I Say". Granted I was first thinking, "Why" but when I actually sat down to do it I found it rather helpful. I, like a few other students, wait a little to close to the deadline to finish my assignments, but this assignment actually gave me a head start.



My final project will have to do with identity, voice, language and cultural borders that are constructed or addressed in young adult Chicano/a/Latino/Hispanic literature. In having to put together a works cited list I went through and looked at what I was most likely to use and then found some essays that would support my argument. The two essays I choose were "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" by Gloria Anzaldua, and "When I was a Young Soldier in the Revolution" by Bell Hooks. These were the two essays that I used for the They Say/I Say assignment.



Graff and Bikenstein offer many options for templates, some better than others, and some that are easily restructured to use in our writing. The quote introduction seemed a little, "I know how to do that", but what I really found helpful and useful were the quote commenting, agreement and disagreement. The disagreement in particular helped me look at the two essays and question what it was I was agreeing with and how that would fit into my argument.

There was I point that I thought to myself, "How can I disagree with Gloria Anzaldua, I mean it is Gloria Anzaldua, she is the reason I have questions about borders to begin with," but forcing myself to disagree brought more understanding.

Bilingualism

"And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife...And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life" ("Art" 12). The idea that habit is the death of life and that art has the ability to bring you back, to awaken senses you thought were gone or had forgotten you had, rings true more often than not.

Doris Sommer address bilingualism as having more possibilities of understanding different worlds and being more creative than being monolingual. Johann Herder argues that "Human spirit...thrived on one vernacular per person and would not tolerate the foreign contamination" (Sommer 5). In other words one language per person, per nation. This makes for a very boring world, not to mention the inability to communicate, interact or learn from different cultures and peoples. Without bilingualism or polylinguasim we let the door open for fascism, as Sommer suggests "Nazism is a glaring example of the conflation of a particular people and a political state" (5).

Working in public education I see this debate on a daily basis. They (bilingual students) need to speak only English. They are in America, so they need to assimilate. There is always a feeling of them vs. us and if they don't assimilate then they are seen as threat and definitely unpatriotic. I don't believe this is the case and tend to lean toward Sommer's perspective that being bilingual allows you to see the world through different lenses.

For example, Sommer talks about code switching, switching in and out of a language something (as far as I know) only those who are bilingual are able to do, and mentions Drown, by Junot Diaz (a great collection if you haven't read it) and Gloria Anzaldua. Both writers address the idea of being bilingual as living in to different places. To Anzaldua this is the "borderlands or Nepantla". A place where there is a linguistic and cultural border; here you must be at least bilingual in order to survive or be accepted. This could be seen as problematic becasue it creates a case of insider vs. outsider, where of course those who are bilingual are in the favorable position and I could see why those who are monolingual could feel threatened.

But still...

Being able to step in and out of languages enables the speaker to shift and understand different realities that those who are monolingual could ignore or see as separate or not of their concern. I think of the example I have of teachers who believe that because students live in America that their main concern should be with English and that Spanish should not be in their world. These teachers, being monolingual and irrational, ignore that perhaps their students reality outside of school is in Spanish or Spanglish and because that is not how they see the world are quick to disregard their students other language as unimportant and not American, regardless if the child is American or not.

Observations in Obvious Advantages to Reading and Applying What is Learned

Chapters four and five in They Say I Say provided templates that give writers an advantage. One the difficulties I have with writing, or that I often doubt I am doing correctly, is stating my argument in a manner that is not so obvious as “This is what I am arguing.” While we may not like the templates (as I have been arguing even in my first blog) they serve as a starting point or at least a reference point. And that is exactly what the examples in the section on voice markers do. We are given choices and options, instead of limiting ourselves with what we are used to doing in our own writing, at least in my case, and then we are given examples on how to use those options to get our point across in an academic manner.

Now to ride the soapbox.

I just wanted to say how helpful the four C’s, context, conversation, components and contribution, have been in reading. I find myself reading the text and being able to pull out each of these items. The advantage lies in that when I do this I have a better understanding of what the author is trying to accomplish. (Surprise, surprise). And like Jackie explained this happens in the beginning and then as I am reading I go back constantly when I am confused about what is going on.
Has anyone else found this helpful in their reading? Just curious.

Quote on

Unlike the Oxford Guide to Library Research, They Say, I Say is much more accessible. While the OGLR is equally as resourceful and helpful, Graff and Bernstein's little book is less dry and easier to read.

The section on quoting is helpful because it provides a refresher on how to use quotes more efficiently in our writing. Quoting, as we learned in high school, makes our writing stronger and more credible. But sometimes, even as graduate students, we can get a little carried away with quoting. I have had the problem before where there are so many good quotes that I want to integrate in my writing that I have used more than is necessary and it makes my paper seem weak because I use a lot of what "they say" instead of what "I say". Part of my problem is as Graff points out, "lack of confidence"(39) in my ability to comment on what I am quoting. This is an issue I must address if I want to be taken as a serious scholar.

The OGLR, as I said, is equally as resourceful. I am not used to researching on-line or in general and, while I am having trouble getting through all the text I find the OGLR useful when I am looking up articles or books in the library catalogs or in last weeks class assignment. This is a book that I will be taking to the library whenever I am doing research and the Graff and Birkenstein book is a good companion on those dark and lonely nights when I need to work on a paper.

A Comparison

Throughout the three essays in ISMLL the one thing that stuck out to was the constant posing of questions. Jarrat offers several definitions rhetoric. "[R]hetoric concerns itself with the ways human beings use speech to influence one another's attitudes and behavior" (74); "Here is a utopian vision of rhetoric: a political practice enabling free and open exchange of views by competent and authorized speakers for efficacious collective action" (74); "rhetoric's typical scene-a single person addressing an audience of quiet listeners" (74); "The speech itself is, both its oral performance and its written version is referred to as rhetoric, a composition crafted to fit a particular situation" (76). These varied definitions or meanings are linked together by the fact that they all describe rhetoric as a type of speech act. Speech acts, according to Austin's theory (as we have discussed and as I have understood in my Discourse Analysis class) is how we do things with utterances (Parastou's definition). Utterances, which do not necessarily have to be complete sentences, perform the task of changing the way of the world by following a set of rules. Rhetoric does this very thing. Rhetoric uses language to persuade or dissuade or change or in some instances maintain the status quo. I agree with Jarrat that understanding the "violent potential of language...[but also having] a sense that language can help us contain or master violent forces" (Jarrat 75), is necessary. She mentions the fact that new voices are emerging in the field of rhetoric, women and people of color; if these writers also view language in the same manner then we will continue to have the change that Bartholomae writes about when it comes to teaching composition. The rhetoric in composition teaching will ultimately change and there will be a more elevated (for lack of a better word) perception of what composition actually is and what comp teachers actually do. With this rhetoric change perhaps will come the answers to the questions that Bartholomae poses at the end of his essay, "What is a good student paper?What genres of writing are appropriate for the college classroom? Can we establish a corpus of student writing for common reference? Are there emerging or possible genres that we have not yet given appropriate attention? What are best practices for courses with varied goals and in varied settings?" (120).