Time --><--Space

I am intrigued by the idea of articulation as an alternative way of thinking about what we do as teachers. Anne Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola write in Blinded by the Letter that

“…this involves, then not just thinking that we should pass along discrete sets of skills to others—or pretending that those discrete sets of skills are all that it takes to have a different life. There are certainly skills needed for connecting and reconnecting information—but the relationships to communication technologies we are describing now and here ask, in necessary addition, for a shared and discussed, ongoing, reconception of the space and time we use together and in which we find (and can construct) information and ourselves.

This reconception is thus not about handing down skills to others who are not where we are, but about figuring out how we all are where we are, and about how we all participate in making these spaces and the various selves we find here.” (italics added; Selfe, Passions Pedagogies and 21^st Century Technologies 366)

Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola counter the banking method of teaching with a social constructivistic proposal for revitalizing the ways we know and teach, privileging communication over the traditional idea of literacy as mastery of skills. Literacy, as an over-arching term that encompasses many different subsets—reading, writing, math, technology, etc.—has traditionally been preferred, possibly because educators who are mandated to assess student learning can more easily measure definable tasks and configurations of those tasks. Moreover, the “‘literacy myth’” (attributed to separate writings by Harvey J. Graff and Ruth Finnegan) is a “belief that literacy will bring us” suffrage, a place in dominant culture, or acceptance in traditionally privileged communities like academia (353). Communication, in the form of articulation, requires rethinking assessment to uncover learning not easily isolated. (This is where Guba and Lincoln’s fourth generation evaluation, particularly the recursivity of hermeneutic dialectics, could be applied.)

In a way, resistance to Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola’s alternative of articulation, as opposed to literacy, could be compared to the resistance to forward-moving writing technologies discussed by Dennis Baron in From Pencils to Pixels. Why change longstanding practices? Why integrate new ways of doing/thinking when the old ways still work (or sorta work)? For example, Douglas Hesse argues that we should retain longstanding essayistic literacy at the same time as new writing technologies make possible listserv “essays,” hypertexts, and other forms of computer-generated writing and communication. He asks whether a discussion thread could be presented as an essay: “Would the result be recognizable as an essay? Even suspending the interesting issues of style and voice, the main quality that threads-as-essays lack is shape and closure” (44). However, Montaigne does not necessarily give shape to his essays nor provide closure to the reader in his chrono-logic (Paul Heilker) approach.

Questions:

1. The most interesting discussion presented in Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola’s article, for me personally, is the idea that “time and space collapsing into each other” (363). What purposes are served through this? How are physically distant place brought close and virtual spaces collapsed (leading “to the idea that real spaces are likewise”)? (364)
2. Do we want to promote the space-time compression mentioned in this article? What can we envision happening in the future as this becomes universal?
3. A question for me to follow up on: How would Yi-Fu Tuan, Edward Soja, and Michel Foucault perceive this postmodern view of collapsed space-time?

(Un)Equal Educational Opportunity

My towns’ (three incorporated and one unincorporated communities strung together) high school had been condemned when I was in first grade. After bussing 7^th through 12^th graders sixteen miles away for one year (a long way, it seemed), junior high students were moved ‘home’ and the gymnasium was curtained with gigantic canvas tarps hung from ropes into large cubicles for elementary classrooms, including mine, until Christmas of my 3^rd grade year. In 1968-9, I was in the ninth grade at a small junior high part of a consolidated school district and appointed to a school-community-educator committee. Our task was to join with representatives from other parts of the district in expressing what our small school needed (along with a couple of other small schools) from the district. Educators from a university moderated and guided the committee for nine months. In all that time, at twice a month meetings, we tried to define what we wanted, “equal educational opportunity.” I remember making lists, talking about why certain items appeared on the list—one of these was the return of our local high school—but our descriptions never satisfied the scholars. We wanted up-to-date books, solid buildings to replace prefabricated Quonset huts, and autonomy. We wanted a return to independence and financial self-sufficiency, a return of the pride we felt as a community that took care of its young. We were a feisty, hardworking coalmining and agricultural community, and we wanted a return to the excellence, the higher educational standards that preceded our absorption into the giant.

Nothing came of the meetings.

My class of 29 students was split between two high schools, and we spent two hours a day on the bus to attend an overcrowded school. Twelve hundred students crammed into a building during my sophomore year. Split sessions – 7 a.m. to noon, noon to 5 p.m., and swing session, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.—challenged the kids I grew up with to keep up, to participate, and to learn to adapt to what was good for us according to the more affluent, more powerful majority.

We wanted equal educational opportunity; they wanted to redistribute the assets and tax proceeds of small appropriated districts. In the name of economic expediency, we lost our community identity, and all across the nation, similar consolidations occurred.

I see similarity in the expansion of school districts and the expansion of technological literacy. Cynthia Selfe writes about some of the dangers of inequity in Technology and Literacy: A Story about the Perils of Not Paying Attention: “In the specific case of the project to expand technological literacy, the claim is that a national program will provide all citizens equal access to an improved education and, thus, equal opportunity for upward social mobility and economic prosperity. If we pay attention to the facts surrounding the project’s instantiation, however, we can remind ourselves of the much harder lesson: in our educational system, and in the culture that this system reflects, computers continue to be distributed differentially along the related axes of race and socioeconomic status and this distribution contributes to ongoing patterns of racism and to the continuation of poverty” (Selfe 101). The disparity of spending between urban and rural schools, between predominately white and Italian/Hispanic/French ethnic groups, and between middle class and working class communities echo loudly in the technological divide Selfe describes. But for both, the powerful stand in the central core of the panopticon and assign those with little or no power to the outer circle. Selfe writes, “The people labeled as ‘illiterate’ in connection with technology – as expected – are those with the least power to effect a change in this system” (107). My community made no headway in bringing high school students home until it gained a seat on the school board, and then improvements came slowly.

For people of color, the distance from agency, let alone power, is often profound. Andrew Walton, in Technology Versus African-Americans, states: “As the world gets faster and more information-centered, it also gets meaner: disparities of wealth and power strengthen; opportunities change and often fade away” (16). This, despite the buy-in to the American dream. “Blacks,” says Walton, “are subject not only to notions of a steady rise but also to the restless ambition that seems a peculiarly American disease” (18). Is it this disease that gives rise to a need for a cyber-underground like Black World to re-create the oral tradition Smitherman catalogues—“call and response, mimicry, signifyin’, testifyin’, exaggerated language, proverbial statements, punning, spontaneity, image-making, braggadocio, indirection, and tonal semantics”? (qtd. In Walton, 79) And does an “underground” signify revolution?

Jeffrey T. Grabill argues in Utopic Visions, The Technopoor, and Public Access: Writing Technologies in a Community Literacy Program that “writing with computers in nonschool contexts is a significant area of inquiry that needs the experience and expertise of computers and composition professionals. But, work in this area demands that we confront complex issues of public access and participate in the design of writing technologies” (299). We’re back to the panopticon—who’s in the middle? Who’s isolated on the outside looking in?

When Foucault asks “why at certain moments that regime undergoes a global modification” (Truth and Power 113), the question of time and timing arises. Giddens has the answer, insisting that “[s]ocial activity is always constituted in three intersecting moments of difference: temporally, paradigmatically (invoking structure which is present only in its instantiation) and spatially. All social practices are situated activities in each of these senses” (Agency, Structure 54).

1. The question of access to technology for marginalized communities and individuals seems to have no concrete answer. If access is denied, the population is alienated and isolated. If access is provided, the population is marginalized as non-owners of the technology and the control of its access. We experience this problem as a binary. How can we—can we ever—resolve it?
2. Despite living through the Clinton-Gore technology boom, I did not recognize the political manipulation that led to economic and social consequences (recovery from recession, proliferation of dotcom millionaires) and broke down when the bubble burst. The glitter of technological advances inspires similar naiveté in me and in others. I don’t believe I’m grazing alone in the field wearing blinders. Is there something more teachers can do than talk about the potential dangers of technology?