I received my PhD in English from St. John's University in 2017. My research is a historiographical study of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style that reconnects the text to some of the political, cultural and institutional networks around the publications of its many editions. Along the way, I discovered a delightful politically progressive William Strunk who was a different person from the one constructed by E.B. White and Macmillan Publishing. Currently I am an adjunct assistant professor teaching first year writing, business writing and literature at St. John's. I also have an interest in digital literacy. I love thinking with students about social media as a place for creating a deep democratic praxis.
My main research is a historiography of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style and the network of interests involved in bringing that text to the marketplace in 1959. Post-Sputnik it supported a monolithic national literacy legislated by Congress and NDEA. Citizenship was tied to a white patriarchal discourse: orderly, efficient. The Elements of Style is the #1 most assigned textbook in North America across a million surveyed syllabi, according to The Open Syllabus Project. It needs to be recontextualized as a product of particular historical moments. To answer Matthew’s important question about how English teachers should respond to our fragmented time, what I’m sharing is a start at a pedagogy that moves to historicize academic discourse and decenter Strunk and White style by helping students to wield language critically and toward democratic dialogue in networked publics.
(slide one) Three concepts have helped me shape a pedagogy for digital literacy that puts the white habitus of academic discourse up for scrutiny. As Peter Krapp writes in Noise Channels: Glitch and Error In Digital Culture, glitch is a deformance of a computing system (Krapp 75). Glitches are creatively repurposed by users in playful resistance to the strictures of computing systems. As I move this idea to composition, glitch takes on a more radical form of creative and disruptive contingencies and counternarratives to the systems of standard academic discourse (Inoue and Poe 2012). Social media writing therefore capitalizes on the extra-systemic event of glitch in linguistic, multimodal and epistemological challenges to standard academic discourse that disrupt the hierarchies of academic language. Multimodal glitchy English is many things: English transgressed by other national and cultural languages, its grammar exploded, its gender norms pushed out of focus, its syllables turned to what West would call the “extraordinary force” of the will to transform...corrupted elite rule into more democratic ways of life” (DM 204).
West ties this will to transform to deeply critical and creative--not necessarily rational-- academic language-- from Melville to the Blues, Toni Morrison and Rap. What helps me, too, with this pedagogy is Keith Gilyard’s further articulation of West’s concern with the racism at the root of American history (62) and the necessity for composition to offer dialogic tools to equip students to confront historically embedded injustices as active citizens.
Finally, a notion of writing as an “event,” comes from Ben Harley of DP Lab, a kind of radical openness to the unpredictable ways digital writing makes our words public. This is risky stuff and coming to terms with how to handle that risk for me is an ongoing concern.
(slide three) This semester’s First Year Writing class moved abruptly into a networked public when Kimberly composed an Instagram journal response to the Ken and Sarah Burns documentary film, The Central Park Five. Her journal elicited a comment from Raymond Santana, one of the teenagers wrongly accused of violent assault in 1989, now an exonerated man. Kimberly emailed me on a Sunday to share this development. We were both unnerved and excited by this sudden incursion of the public into our safe institutional space. The next day, when she revealed to the class what had happened, the group erupted out of their chairs. We talked: How do hashtags connect users to participatory networks? Who are the audiences for social media, and how do we speak and listen to them? And, as Henry Jenkins asks in his own research, “Under what conditions [do] young people begin to think of themselves as political agents?” (Jenkins, Ito, boyd 152).
Over the next few class sessions, students who initially had declined the option to go public changed their privacy settings, and Santana continued to respond to IG journals with likes. He had became part of our discussion. Students’ words resonated with him. In the moment Kimberly realized the reach of her language, the conventional idea of writing as a process jumped to “writing as an event that transforms those who engage in it” (Harley, Digital Pedagogy Lab).
(slide 4) For Gilyard and for other critical pedagogues, rhetoric and composition are the spaces in which we “take back higher education” from the various institutional conditions that depoliticize it (Gilyard 4). What I find most inspiring for my own teaching practice are students like Averielle and Romeche, two Caribbean American women whose collaborative fictional fairy tale romance between Caribbean Americans set in the material spaces of Brooklyn is a beautifully constructed 10-post IG essay about negotiating racialized and transcultural spaces in New York City. It is filled with metaphor, joy and bite, a critical turn about the room with language. How can English teachers respond to fragmented political culture? I’m looking for ways to avoid “consuming” or composing language uncritically, and, therefore refuse the uncritical consumption of American life (Gilyard). This matters now more than ever.
Works Cited
Gilyard, Keith, Composition and Cornel West: Notes Toward A Deep Democracy, Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University, 2008.
Giroux, Henry A., Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014.
Harley, Ben, Risk and Event-based Pedagogies, Digital Pedagogy Lab, 25 July, 2017.
Inoue, Asao B., and Mya Poe, editors, Race and Writing Assessment, New York: Peter Lang Publishing,
2012.
Jenkins, Henry, Mizuka Ito, danah boyd, Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: A Conversation On Youth,
Learning, Commerce and Politics, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Krapp, Peter, Noise Channels: Glitch And Error In Digital Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011.
West, Cornel, Democracy Matters, Winning The Fight Against Imperialism, New York:
Penguin Books, 2004.
"Empowering Education With Social Annotation and Wikis," Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning, Jack Dougherty and Tennyson O'Donnell, editors, WebWriting.trincoll.edu 2015 and University of Michigan Press, 2015.
"Strunk and White Set The Standard," Bad Ideas About Writing, Drew M. Loewe and Cheryl E. Ball (eds.) Bad Ideas About Writing, Morgantown,WV: Digital Publishing Institute 2017).