On blogging. And why I haven’t.

Because my ideas.

Are swirling

Around

And around

And there is a bride here.

I am sure that fits in

Because it is so distracting

The institution of family

So distracting

And central

And that has nothing to do with marriage

And that is the distraction

The socio-historiical-institution of fill in the blank

That puts pressure on my words and make hard to

Find my place

My starting place

In anything other

Than strings of incoherency

(so I make it into a poem)

 Even though I have asked everyone

Around me to inquire, blog, share, write

And I swish things around in my head

Salting any little wounds

And I ask you to dive daggers into the heart

Of the situation

And put your words out there

And I

Simmer

And consider

And thinking is writing, right?

Shouldn’t I stop emailing

You about what you are thinking

And give myself a talking to  

And I am of course.

The bride, construct of pure, good feminine

Talks to my head all day

About why my writing and my not writing

Isn’t good enough.

Damn.

Self pitying poem.

See?

Damn again.

High Heels, Hairbows and What Good Means: A Writing History in Mashup

In making a timeline of my writing history in the UNC Charlotte Writing Project Summer Institute last week, I was consumed by the story of the first writing I recall doing (writing about a Disney vacation with my grandparents in a Minnie Mouse diary).  This got me thinking about how the writer I am today is steeped in commodity forms, like diaries and vacations.  Images of what it means to be a good girl, a good writer, good not evil are constructed through me, in me, as I have led a Disneyed life.    Even as I intentionally resist commercialization in many parts of my adulthood my own constructs of writing, identity and value are knot connected to high heeled and hair bowed Minnie dressed in so many different ways as the object of (my own and Mickey’s) pity.  

Minnie, teary-eyed, done up, never the subject of her own story, embodies my own position as writer.  To be a good girl, a good writer, I would need to be both perfectly made up all on my own and simultaneously available as the victim-object of hero savior fantasies.  So my writing must be very good, (no messy drafts slipping out below my hemline) and also (probably because I am so distracted by jerking down my skirt to cover over any errors) I must still be available to happily drown (in the ocean or in my own tears).  

As an attempt to disrupt this story, this history, I want to remix the images of the Mouse, the ultimate logo.  By mashing Minnie with voices that clang and converge I elucidate the hidden scripts of gender at play in writing lives.

On the Nuts (and Bolts) of the Workshop Classroom

to wax poetic
with what is
available
more writers
writing tools
a writing kind of day
or not


with
napkins
notes passed
under the table
skyped, texted, facebooked
out of the room
while papers turn
into a stack
on the teacher's desk

to wax poetic
when you have to
and when you don't

A Socio-Historical Review of Psychosocial Research

My reading of Growing Up Girl (2001) is steeped in my own history as a reader and academic.  All of that I bring to meanings I make and remake with each page, each word.  I am drawn to and put off by this book before I have opened the cover, even before I have selected this title from the other possibilities on the Summer I course syllabus that has brought it to my attention.  Rosenblatt (1995) describes this intertextuality as an active construction of meaning between text and reader.  There is not in this book or any text an inherent meaning.  There is only the particular meaning that I make in connection to the histories I bring to the moment of engagement.  Interestingly enough, the authors of Growing Up Girl, Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody, develop a similar approach to research, in which their subjectivities (meaning making) as researchers becomes primary data of the research and a primary site for psychoanalysis.  In the following review I juxtapose my own reading experiences with an analysis of the methodology of Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody.

Late Fall
Lil emails me with some books she is thinking of using in her spring course on identity.  She particularly wants me to think about this passage from Julie Bettie’s Women Without Class.  She says there is something here that really jives with the thinking we have been doing about identity and performance.  She thinks I might be interested in the whole reading list. 

However solitary I might have appeared or even felt with Growing Up Girl in hand at a table for one at a local coffee shop, I really read this book from within a particular academic conversation, which I am bringing into dialogue with this next text.  I am drawn to the exploration of gender and class that Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody surface.  My interest in gender, class and Marxism, for instance, are part of local conversations in my professional and academic work. 


These concepts have been particularly framed for me by identity and rhetoric studies. Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody, however, are working from another discourse community that crossing somewhere between psychology and sociology.  In a bigger theoretical picture, though, this book works on familiar ground of Marxism and post structuralism.  At times the ways that these are realized, through psychosocial analysis and methodology, distances me as a reader working outside and sometimes in tension with my own academic discipline and the academic conversation into which I have been reading and writing.

Winter
Ethnographies and Histories.  I spend winter break reading when I can.  On a plane trip to a conference on the west coast, my friend and colleague Cindy and I are both reading the Bettie book, Women Without Class.  We keep poking each other across the aisle of the airplane to look at some quote or to talk about how this connects to our work at the middle school.  When the plane touches down we turn on our phones and text our writing group about the ideas we have spinning.

I was very engaged by Growing Up Girl as a response and critique to other research on women (Demos, 1997, in Walkerdine, Lucey & Melody) that erases class differences.  The authors show the erasure of labor and economic hierarchies in the “accomplishment” of (some) women’s rights.  This work puts women’s work and stories of work, both at home, school and in paid labor at the center of its data and analysis bringing issues of class to the surface of a muddied modernist conversation.  I read the use of these stories of class as comparative case studies and the psychosocial analysis as more complicated. 

Even as I look back into Growing Up Girl at this writing I find so many passages that have me nodding my head and taking notes for future reference.  All this, though, is shawled by my reading of other works in identity studies that seem to be in conversation with this book only through me.  There are citations of big names that are familiar: Foucault, Bourdieu, Marx, Butler, but this book is clearly coming from a different disciplinary circle that I have been reading.  While the object of study, political interests and larger theoretical framework is meshing, similar works in rhetoric and identity studies (Bettie, 2003; Cintron, 1997; Lindquist, 2002; Wray, 2006) draw on a history of social constructivism (Vygotsky) and language studies (Bahktin) which sees identity as constructed in social structures with limited permeability. 

Julie Bettie, for instance, in her study of social class in high school girls talks about the groups of girls at Waretown both in terms of distinction used by the girls themselves (Chicas, Cholas, Preps, Mexican Preps, etc) and by descriptors of ways of living (hard-living, settled-living).  The main force of the book is in describing the creation of these social and class boundaries and the moments in which the boundaries become permeable.  She theorizes this in terms of the ways that social scripts for the most part construct categories of differences, and also the ways these scripts are performed and so are changeable at least in limited ways.  She writes carefully of this tension between cautiously possible agency and structure and in so doing creates a complicated, multilayered story and argument about the girls in the study.

Early May
As I read over the course syllabus, I’m sure my father’s lifted eyebrow ruffles across my own forehead as I wonder about how this document is constructing me as a student.  I get ready to play school.   

With this reading of Bettie up next to my read of Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody, I wonder about how the methodology of comparative case study is setting this research up for the problems I am seeing in the hardening of identity categories.  In Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody girls’ class labels are held to tightly by the researchers, in fact with the intention to show the class distinctions beyond the financial and material.  The groupings of girls as part of the method for the purpose of comparison in this way actively seeks out differences between categories, erasing differences within categories. 

The strength of Bettie is the careful striking of the analysis between seeing possibility of agency and material realities of social reproduction.   For Bettie identity is both performed (and so can be chosen) and also performative (since the choices are [very] limited by social structures).  In Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody this intersection between individual and social is met through a different and in my view more problematic layering of analysis.  The social structures in place for the girls are evident in the first two steps of narrative analysis used by the researchers.  The third step in their protocol asked for a very interesting reflexive lens on the data.  In this stage the researchers applied psychoanalysis to their reflexive stance on their own perceptions, reactions, and responses to data and data collection. 

The psychoanalytic tradition does create an interesting mix with the sociological study of structures, however the baggage of the philosophy as not only Western, white and male-centered but also working on the epistemological premise that there is definitive meaning to be found in “the mind” is at odds with poststructural theory as applied to the rest of the book.  The treatments of the researchers’ subjectivities are commendable for being a significant project of this research.  However, the fore fronting of the researchers as subjects diminishes possibility for participants as subjects.  While Bettie shows both the constraints of social structures on identity and the performance-quality of identity in the girls, Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody name the social scripts of the girls and themselves through their narrative analysis, but hand over any potential of individual will or agency not to the women participants or researchers but to the essentialist, deterministic, patronizing hands of Freud (and ilk). 

First I check the reading list.  Two textbooks.  I can likely borrow those from a friend.  (No need to put more money than absolutely necessary into the textbook company pockets.)  And, what?!  A book selection of choice list.  Okay!  There are some interesting titles here.  Oh, Growing Up Girl… sounds like Bettie.  I wonder if I can read that without a chip on my reading glasses?

In my read of Growing Up Girl I saw moves toward the framing of differences along the lines of (researcher) subjectivity.  I continue to wonder how qualitative methods, particularly as tied to theoretical frameworks, construct ways of naming differences.  I have looked at the ways that Growing Up Girl sometimes complicates and sometimes hardens categories of difference.    By putting this work in psychosocial discourse up next to this reader’s history in rhetoric and identity studies, I have considered the ways that methodology and theoretical lenses mesh between reader and writer so that the understanding of the research, even in its final produced form is still forming and formed in transaction with the power structures at work in circulating the text to this particular reader at this locally affixed socio-historical moment.

References

Bettie, J. (2003). Women without class: Girls, race and identity.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cintron, R. (1997). Angels Town: Chero ways, gang life and the rhetoric of everyday. Beacon Press.

Lindquist, J. (2002).  A place to stand: Politics and persuasion in a working-class bar. Oxford:  Oxford University Press.

Rosenblatt, L. (1997). Literature as Exploration.  New York: Modern Language Association.

Walkerdine, V., Lucey, H. & Melody, J. ( 2001). Growing up girl: Psychosocial explorations of gender and class. New York: New York University Press.

Wray, M. (2006). Not quite white: White trash and the boundaries of whiteness.  Durham: Duke University Press.

What the Badge?

I seemed to have marked my time at the Digital Media andLearning Conference by a movement through the story of badges.  On Thursday as I was getting my conference bearings, I edged into what turned out to be an impromptu lobby session on badges.  So as far as I can tell badges are a way of alternately recognizing work and skill attainment through online display of earned symbols.  (Think about your old girl scout vest.) The badges I have been hearing about at DML are being tied to or layered over forms of assessment in schools or newly formed as online recognition formats for non-school entities.  

In my experience of early #dml2012 the rhetoric seemed to be that badges could be an optimum replacement of grades, in which students can be recognized for their achievements and successes and move forward with the next steps of learning in self directed ways. Metaphorically I’m not sure that I fully walked away from that lobby badge session during the rest of the conference.  My head couldn’t quite stop thinking about that puzzle of people standing about and circling up chairs in the hallway to figure out this badge thing.  Well, I’ll circle back to that towards the end of my post.

At first I felt rather at odds with the DML crowd, I found the thread of competitiveness unnerving up next to and sometimes woven with strings of civic engagement and social justice.  The collusion with private for profits that is quickly moving in on all of public education was an unapologetic segment of DML, too.  I felt this most at the awards ceremony for the DML research funding competition, Rewards, Reputation and Recognition.  All of the funds awarded were for badge based projects, in fact the application itself requested projects surrounding the conversation on badges.  There is an interesting side note about e portfolios here, that felt very side-lined to me.

As the endweek and weekend unfolded, though, I noticed a sense of hacking (of course) into the normative stance on badges and privatization, particularly notable in the final ignite session when HenryJenkins’ moment of badge critique was met with applause of at least half the room.  Throughout the conference everyone’s stance on everything seemed to me to rotate around the issue of badges.  Were badges mentioned apologetically? with excitement?  accompanied by a WTF face? or with unconvinced curiosity?   

The best example I saw of a counter-badge story comes from a youth led session, Education for a Digital Democracy: Harnessing the Power of New Media to Empower Urban Students Personally, Academically and Civically, in which a youth presenter from the Council on Youth Research told a story about a community member coming by the school garden and asking if he could buy vegetables.  The kid narrated how the student-gardeners shook their heads, saying, “ you don’t have to buy them, they’re free.”   The high school free public garden shows the possibility of use value in education.  The kids were involved in the learning surrounding the gardening project because of the civic engagement, the social connectivity and the material creation of a sustainable and healthy food source for their communities. 

The non-badge sessions I went to and badge-critical action here and there had me thinking on the plane ride back to the East Coast about the theories and stake holders working through badges.  I decided to let some theorist speak for themselves.  Here’s a short play on badge theory:

Arne Duncan:   These badges are awesome!  We should start adding them to state flags!  You tech people are da bomb!

Karl Marx:       (sigh) YOU would like them.

Michel Foucault: (with straight face) Yes, all the better to propagate the panopticon prison model creating     self-regulation of state ideology.

Duncan:            Self-regulation is awesome!  Think how much money we can save.  

Marx:               (sigh) (to others) You see, change from inside the model is impossible.

Helen Cixous:  (with frown) Let us explore the significance of the closed circle of the badge symbol.  This is the closing off of meaning through symbolically representing learning, which is intangible, fluid, moving, in the confines of measured marks. We must work to the dispersal of meaning—ripping the seams from the stitches of patriarchy that bind each of us, women and men, to a history of categorization and binding off (in circular symbols of attainment- of what!) from one another, from possibility, (continues into hash of words whose meaning is understood in the loss of meaning)

Duncan:            Uhhhh… I think she’s with us!  Yeah!  Badges!

Marx:               (sighs) This infatuation with credentialing and recognition is yet another spasm of capitalism that seeks to mark and differentiate kids of labor and accord a differentiation of value to those labors.

Foucault:         We are each creating the power/knowledge that exists in badges, which of course, means we can potentially, if at great risk, resist.

Duncan:           (to all) Exactly who are you, anyway?  (lifts eyebrows suspiciously)

 

So I’m back home thinking about my first DML conference and what I find most interesting about the space is the mix of people, ideas and purposes.  Even as I saw an official script on badges from DML itself, I saw in the people of DML many layers of inquiry into, re-mixing of, countering and openly resisting badgification.  This is interesting to me in terms of this moment when badging is becoming hot, since being at DML gave me space to sort out the particulars of my lens on the issue.  Also, my tour of DML via badge talk gave me insight into what kind of community DML is. Here’s what I’ve come up with:  DML is a diverse place, with people from many sectors, a large contingent of whom are very interested in re-mixing, hacking and resisting dominant politics, economics and social hierarchies that maintain current class structures to the material benefit of a few.  It’s really good to me that a range of people and ideas are circulating at DML.  This makes it a site for public conversation and action.  And yet, if this a place for a resistant conversation with many stake holders, what the badge are we doing focusing as a community, on symbols of learning rather than learning itself?

Story of a DML Panelist: Who Gets to be Participatory?

This is me.  As videoed by my three year old.  Some aspects of my identity are closed off, others are left in tack or even fore fronting, (MaMaMa!).  I think composing, whether through video or text or tangible design, always does this kind of filtering out of ideas and identities.  I could here, for instance, tell you about my story as an early childhood teacher, a graduate student, an adjunct college instructor, a teacher consultant, a writer, mother of a young child.  I might even present myself as multiplicitious, showing how these identities converge and inform one another.  I would inevitably leave some things out.  My whiteness, my middle classness didn’t make my initial list above.  It’s these erasures that are academically interesting and politically vibrant to me.  What stories, whose voices, what aspects of identity are hidden or unvoiced in the compositions that are circulated in schools and the larger public sphere?   

One of the draws into new media studies for me is the call for participation from stakeholders.  As shown in the student work I am sharing today from a Digital Is resource I created, Wanna See the Movie?, this idea of participatory culture has potential to shift the view toward untold stories and unheard voices.   And at the same time I am wary of a romanticism with the digital that masks more of the same objectivist logic that promotes competition, individualism and measurement.  Right now many public schools in my region, are purchasing expensive software, like Teen Biz marketed and profited upon by the Achieve 3000 company.  This program and other similar ones, narrowly defines literacy practices according to numerical measures of student reading abilities and defined boundaries for what student composition can look like and be used for.  In some schools these packaged technologies leave little or no space for multimodal composition or possibility for public conversation.  

Multiplicity, voice and creative production could screw with the formulaic, regurgative, and consumptive terms of composition under which students usually write and read.   These different frames of literacy learning are valuable to me in their potential to make visible people, stories and parts of our identities that are more likely hidden or seen as resistant.   To be useful to a call for social change, multiplicity has to be connected to social critique in which hierarchies of difference and their connection to material economic inequalities are named and challenged.   The frame of participatory learning pushes us as pedagogy and practice shift toward more open and creative classrooms, to continue to think about who is getting to participate in these shifts and to whose benefit.  

As I began my introduction of self here with my young child’s video, I made visible the voice of the young child, who is usually silenced in academic forums.  I also put pressure on the conception of academic work as distinct from the personal, from the home life as I forefront myself as a caregiver.  If you all accept my negotiation of academic identity, this can be a move in critique of a dominant narrative of academia as adult, male and separate from the private labors of family life.  The video here in this context represents a critically aimed multiplicity.  And at the same time it closes off other areas of difference.  As I nominate the mothering identity here before any other, I reproduce a history that puts the primacy of care-giving with women (even as in the same moment I challenge the history of maleness in academia).  For instance, it could be more disruptive, or at least disruptive in another way, to connect maleness with mothering.   The issue is in both the participation of a particular story/identity/voice and the reflective moment to show what is and isn’t being made visible thereby in terms of social hierarchies.  

In that a singularity of expression is so understood as the problem  (to those who believe in a problem here at all) of traditional composition in schools, the “multiplicitious” text must also be held in reflection to notice the singularities of meaning that are present there, too.  

A Personal History with Qualitative Research (Theory of ResearchPart 2)

About three years ago, I was working in our local Writing Project office putting returned books on the shelf. Ways with Words stuck out to me as I shelved books on revision in high school classrooms, conferencing with elementary school students and teaching ethnography in first year writing. My friend and fellow Writing Project teacher, Sally Griffin, who had been studying mills in Gastonia, North Carolina, had mentioned this book to me multiple times. Standing at the bookcase with an odd moment after facilitating a professional development workshop and before my graduate class, I picked up the book and realized that this was about young children, their families and literacy. Flipping through the beginning pages I saw Piedmont and South Carolina and stowed the book in my backpack.

This was the summer that my child was one year old. I can remember one day sitting with him in the sagging recliner chair we liked to nurse in, with smart phone off to the side and book thrown open on the armrest. While Luke gulped down milk, I tried to swallow back my academic romanticism as I read about somebody else in the world thinking about young children and their words as vital to literacy or cultural studies. I didn’t know then about Foucault’s power/knowledge or the possibilities of reflexive research. I read Shirley Brice Heath calling a two year old child’s street talk poetry and making it central to her academic analysis. That this book was on the Writing Project shelf along with all of the books written by and for teachers of older students, gave me some idea that my work too could have some place in the conversation.

With Ways with Words published in the early 80’s a shift in the conversation of qualitative research started happening. Heath studied the ways young children, their families and schools in mill towns in South Carolina constructed ideas of literacy. She built relationships with people in the communities she names as “Roadville” and “Trackton” and spent in depth time in each place, participating and documenting daily life with her gaze particularly bent toward language and meanings. Kamberelis and Dimitriadis (2004) mark this work as a turn toward interpretive qualitative research, where meaning was seen as locally and socially constructed.

Kamberelis and Dimitriadis go on to talk about other shifts in possibilities in qualitative research theories of practice. While I am framing my research in the chronotope, Power/Knowledge and Defamiliarization, which they associate with post-modern and post-structural theory, I am winding over to my thinking about Heath in this post because her work is connected to my history as researcher of young children and to my current approach, critical post-modern as it attempts to be.

In 1983 when Shirley Brice Heath was participating (though she didn’t write it up that way) in mill village communities in the Piedmont, I was four years old in another mill town a few counties away in the same state. From my grandmother’s house on Smith Avenue, we would often take the winding narrow road through the “mill hill” to town rather than going up to the stoplight to Main Street. On the far end of Smith Avenue, away from the “mill hill” my grandmother often pointed out to me the now flat corner where the big Smith House used to stand. I think I was in high school when my Papa mentioned to me that his granddaddy had owned all this land, all these houses from Smith Avenue all the way along the rail road toward the mill. And though my family had moved over the years into other kinds of work, mostly teaching, I remember feeling embarrassed with the idea that my family had held this ownership status.

My history of white and class privilege is intertwined with my history as an early childhood worker and as a woman in complicated ways that have interesting implications for any work I take on as a researcher. Kirsch and Ritchie (1995) call for including and theorizing narrative within research as ethical practice to collapse illusions of objectivity toward multiplicity of perspectives. I’m down with this thinking, and beyond showing the multiplicity of myself, I want to figure research participants as subjects, and narrate with them the tensions of their identities in the way that others have (Hull, et al, 1991; Trainor, 2008). Like Cintron’s ethnographic work in Angels Town (1997), I want to show the collision between identities, location power structures from which no perfect multiplicity or dialogic escape is possible.

Cintron, R. (1997). Angels Town: Chero ways, gang life and the rhetoric of everyday. Beacon Press.

Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hull, G., Rose, M., Fraser, K.L., Castellano, M. (1991). Remediation as social construct: Perspectives from an analysis of classroom discourse. College Composition and Communication, 42, 299 – 329.

Kamberelis, G. & Dimitriadis, G. (2004). On qualitative inquiry: Approaches to language and literacy research. NY: Teachers College Press.

Kirsch, G.E. & Ritchie, J.S. (1995). Beyond the personal: Theorizing a politics of location in composition research. College Composition and Communication, 46, 7 – 29.

Trainor, J.S. (2008). The emotioned power of racism: An ethnographic portrait of an all-white high school. College Composition and Communication, 60, 82 – 112.