You are what you do

"You are what you have experienced," Gee writes about the sub-text of Blue's Clues. Amen.

To that I would add, you learn what you do or what you can simulate doing or imagine doing. This is more than a learning preference for many working class/poor students. It's also a rhetorical preference which in turn embodies a worldview, one that values experience-based knowledge—embodied experience—over abstraction and "objectivity."

I do love Gee for his insights into learning from a cognitive psych perspective, and for that he is justly famous. But he often gets ding-ed if not denigrated for his lack of attention to culture and class issues. This chapter would seem to exonerate him on that charge. While I can see how some of the things he says here might be taken out of context (things like gender and ethnicity don't matter under the new capitalist order), I see another problem here with how he talks about class issues: his point of emphasis is so disproportionately focused on "well-off teens" (105), with the issue of the poor taken up and tacked on at the end as if an afterthought, left unpondered or at least underpondered. The second and more insidious problem: he acts as if the experiences of the poor don't matter in this millennium, failing to recognize much less explore possible connections between their experiences and their futures. Ironically, the childrearing practices as well as the socialized learning styles of many students of poverty ALSO (not just the well-off shape-shifters, as required by the new capitalism) favor experience-based knowledge and knowledge-making, with apprenticeships drawing on learning-by-doing models. I would argue that these preferences COULD serve them well... if we as teachers would take fuller advantage of that fact and stop treating "underprepared" students as if they are coming to school and college without linguistic and learning resources. This week we're going to focus on just that: how to make those connections.

And how to make those connections within our own local context: Intro Comp, WSU, 2007. Going local is one of the major points that Bizzell makes in her "Hybrid Discourses" article, but ironically she doesn't follow her own advice. She recommends that basic writing courses be designed around a single teacher-selected issue of "cultural crux" and then giving students choices about how to respond. Bizzell also argues intro courses need to require lots of reading—and not just the writing of other students—so they can see what academic discourse is like and then imitate it. What bugs me the most is how she talks about basic writing, especially when she talks about personal narrative as not really being appropriately scholarship, for example, when she keeps telling us Victor's work isn't a personal memoir; it's scholarship. We're going to focus exclusively on curriculum and pedagogy over the next couple of weeks and beyond so no need to elaborate here, except to say that I seriously disagree with Bizzell's advice. Back to the theme of this blog: once again, there's the negative valuation of experience-based knowledge.

Something else I want to point out about the Bizzell pieces: the controversy over the NAME of this sub-field. We've gone from "contrastive rhetoric" to "hybrid discourses" to "mixed or blended discourses"... and we're about to get the term "alternative discourses," the next book we're going to be reading—and a term that has already been hunted down and hounded out of existence (in the very same book no less!) Although Bizzell very thoroughly critiques her own coinage "hybrid discourses" (her own, in that she adapt postcolonial theory to comp studies), the term "hybrid" persists and at least at the moment prevails... as I notice as I flip through the Cs program coming up in New York this week. Weird, but just last year I couldn't find any session on the topic of mixed, hybrid, contrastive, or alternative discourses... and this year: POW. It's all over the place.

Ahhh yes: the ways of academe. Who wouldn't want to be one of our number???

One last thought: Gee on the three TV shows ... parallels different views of culture we've talked about this semester.
Sesame Street celebrated cultural difference.
Barney focused on cultural commonality.
Blue's Clues assumes that culture is produced, and identity constructed to a certain degree, the show focusing on problem-solving through mediation with an adult. That's also the model of teaching/learning to which we'll now turn in the next segment of the course.