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Articles Conference Reviews |
2008G2HartNot Just a Bullet on an Outcomes Statement: Taking Civic Literacy Seriously Patricia Roberts-Miller: Imagination, Group Identity, and Social Psychology’s Contribution to Civic Literacy Roberts-Miller began the panel by pointing out that not only is the term “literacy” still a contested term, but there is also a lot of disagreement about what is meant by the word “civic.” The difference, she suggested, is that while there have been several high-profile debates over what we should mean when we talk about “literacy,” there’s generally few debates about what we mean when we use the modifier “civic.” She suggested that the disagreements about the definition of “civic” may be an issue of the imagination, since there are all sorts of metaphors (e.g. “sphere”) that are associated with the word. While these metaphors may be a figment of the imagination, she continued, we must realize that the metaphors used are not politically inconsequential. The trickiest word in the phrase “how we imagine civic,” she posited, is “we.” Who is the “we,” for instance, in the phrase “we Americans” with regard to the mortgage crisis, homosexual adoption, etc, she asked. In the 19th century, she reminded the audience, “we Americans” were property-owning, straight, white males. She acknowledged that later identity politics and movements for civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights made inroads into this restricted definition of “we Americans. “ However, Roberts-Miller expressed concern about the attempt to imagine a more calculated and controlled dream of who “we Americans” are. According to Roberts-Miller the contemporary attack on liberalism, which she characterized as an attempt to imagine laws as public debate guided by reason, are an expression of the risk of creating a more definitive definition of “we Americans.” To Roberts-Miller, “reason” is also a “devil term.” To illustrate, she provided a brief case study of Focus on the Family. Focus on the Family, she explained, defines truth as that which conforms to the reality of God’s truth as set forth in the Bible. Focus on the Family claims that “we can’t dissect truth, we can only proclaim it.” The first problem, she suggested, is that this statement may include two “we's.” She then discussed an article by Velarde on the Focus on the Family website that apparently attacks religious skeptics and makes a circular argument about faith pretending to be reason. The problem with such a hermetically sealed argument, she pointed out, is that it is unable to be tested. Roberts-Miller then suggested that “reason” has become too narrowly associated with “certainty,” which is only one definition of the term. She reminded the audience of Aristotle’s 5 ways of knowing, of which epistemic knowledge is only one way of knowing. Phronesis, she went on to argue, has gotten lost. When she talks about reason, Roberts-Miller explained, she is talking about phronesis; she is suggesting that we can believe things that are not grounded on reason, but we shouldn’t then pretend that they are reasonable. That’s the objection she has to Focus on the Family’s claim to being reasonable because they exempt themselves from reason. If they want to have a valid claim for reasoned argument, she suggested, they should articulate the conditions under which their reasons can be falsified and should offer responses to any contradictory evidence. Roberts-Miller concluded by pointing out that it benefits groups such as Focus on the Family politically to move to a more narrow definition of “we.” But, she proclaimed, “we rhetoric and composition folks” need to imagine a “civic” that is broader and more reasonable [in the broader sense of that term]. Jonathan Goodwin: Information Poisoning and Civic Literacy Goodwin began his talk with reference to a recent article printed in the Baton Rouge Advocate concerning the Louisiana Academic Freedom Act, a bill that is being sponsored by a Democrat and ostensibly seeks to preserve objectivity and critical thinking skills, as there is some concern that issues such evolution, global warming, etc. are being suppressed by instructors who “don’t want to tackle” these issues. The news article cites a professor of anthropology who claims that downplaying evolution makes the state look “silly, as well as critics of the bill who say the current biology textbooks are flawed because they present a “one-sided story of creation.” By choosing what to include and who to quote, the journalist framed the issue in a particular way for the readership, Goodwin pointed out, and then he suggested that meta-analyses of news articles such as the one he opened with should be used in the composition classroom to teach critical literacy and critical thinking skills. He acknowledged that the term “critical thinking” is often “sneered at and maligned,” but he posited that Donald Lazare reclaims the validity of the term with his definition, which includes recursion and information gathering. Like Roberts-Miller, Goodwin also acknowledged that there are problems with contesting definitions of the terms “literacy” and “civic,” but he championed Lazare’s approach to teaching civic literacy as well as Lazare’s belief that the parochial perspective of college students can be broadened if they can learn to identify the political orientation of the writers whose work they are reading and can understand and analyze their use of words, their arguments, etc., and he suggested that the idea of “teaching the conflicts” can be updated in the information age. One of the problems with information overload, Goodwin suggested, is that students’ parochialism can be expanded in the “echo chamber” of the Internet, as the evidence of on-line group participation confirms. But in addition to being a source of “information poisoning,” Goodwin said, the Internet also provides more chances for students to make random research discoveries. As an example, he offered one exercise that he has found useful: he asks his students to choose a descriptive acronym for a paper topic and then to cite sources written by authors whose last names begin with the letters of the acronym (e.g. L/E/G/A/L/I/Z/A/T/I/O/N for a paper about drug legalization). These arbitrary restrictions, he has found, force students to move out of their comfort zones, to read and respond to “alienating discoveries,” and to move beyond their traditional sources. Robin Murphy: The Eyes Have It: Visual Literacy as Civic Responsibility (Read by Jen Almjeld in Murphy’s absence) Murphy’s talk began with a personal anecdote about how, when she began her job at a regional university in the region in which she grew up, she thought she would know her students. But what she found was a stark difference between what she characterized as the haves and have-nots—those who were media savvy and those who were not. As a result, she began to rethink what teaching her students about civic responsibility—and how to act as responsible citizens—might mean. Since few of her students had an understanding of visual design, she began with a unit on visual analysis. Using Ball and Arola’s “ix visual exercises” CD-ROM to frame the assignment and to provide the students some critical vocabulary, Murphy asked her students to assess and analyze a photograph of their choice. Not surprisingly, she initial got lots of questions about how a family or personal photograph could be analyzed as an argument. But once she got them thinking about the ways in which such images could be viewed as social commentaries on cultural traditions, she saw them “morph into more active citizens.” Based upon her classroom experiences, Murphy has found that the best question to ask students is “What do you have to know to understand this text?” whether the text is a website, an editorial cartoon, a photograph, or something else. She also finds it important that the students become aware of their classmates as co-citizens. Another exercise she has found productive is to provide students with examples of Pulitzer Prize-winning photos and editorial cartoons and to ask them to apply the “ix” terms, to go beyond the literal images to the embedded messages, and to parse those messages as rhetorical conventions. Teaching visual analysis, she concluded, is imperative for training an active citizenry. Clancy Ratliff: What Can Composition Learn from Bloggers’ Civic Writing? Tapping Into the Agora Ratliff began by framing her talk in light of her experience as a new WPA. After a year of running a first-year writing program, Ratliff has concluded 1) that there is no right or wrong way to teach FYW—even Current Traditional pedagogy has some value in giving students opportunities to write and to provide responses to others’ writing and 2) FYW teachers are saddled with too many responsibilities and outcomes, including, but not limited to: library research skills, learning rhetorical concepts, mastering grammar, embracing issues of diversity, showing proficiency in technological literacy, understanding writing as process, learning academic genres, embracing critical reading, understanding organization of written texts, and creating thesis statements. Given these daunting expectations, Ratliff has concluded that if she had to adhere to a certain approach to teaching FYW, it would be civic literacy, since the habits it develops in writers have crossover potential for most of the outcomes, and civic literacy also has the most potential to help students as human beings. Like the other panelists, Ratliff pointed out the variety of conceptions of civic literacy, including service learning, reading the news, and the “social turn” in composition (learning to be more aware of issues of race, gender, different abilities, etc.). Like Goodwin, however, Ratliff relies upon Donald Lazare’s definition of civic literacy as a sense of history, an understanding of national and international political organizations and ideologies—what she characterized as a familiarity with a vocabulary and certain kinds of discourses that can bring students to an awareness of the labels they give themselves. Ratliff then identified the contemporary agora as the universe of civic and political discourse including TV and talk radio pundits, newspaper op-ed pages, and, increasingly, bloggers. The agora, she admitted, is full of polarized viewpoints that may not necessarily be good models for civic discourse and might even turn students off of “civic discourse” entirely. When she asks her students why they tend not to read, listen to, or watch the news, they respond that they think too much background knowledge is needed (i.e. they feel as if they are entering the conversation too late); that the news is too pointless (because it is too agonistic, full of spin, talking points, speechwriters, opinion polls, pandering, and corporate sponsorship) to be of value; or that they feel a lack of agency to do anything about the issues in the news. To overcome the students’ aversion to news, Ratliff recommended Lazare’s 4 unit approach: 1) learn the definitions of the various ideological viewpoints, 2) identify personal psychological blocks to perceiving bias, 3) analyze models of biased and deceptive rhetoric, and 4) locate and evaluate the biases of other sources. Ratliff mentioned Lazare’s textbook Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy as the source for this approach, but she questioned the feasibility of using the textbook in a FYW course. However, she stated, the technique can certainly be drawn upon. She recommended that bloggers be used as models of engaged citizens since most bloggers are usually amateurs who have developed the habit of engaging in reading and writing in the public sphere. She showed a chart including blogs that could be placed within the spectrum of Lazare’s political categories and suggested that students be given assignments in which they read a range of current events bloggers, summarize their points of view, and then talk about how they might have responded differently and how they might imagine things from a different perspective. Afterward, the students could be asked to go to a deeper question about how they know the things they know. |