Playful Writing

Could the way we play affect society? Could the rules-free version of US play lead to aggressive, a-social hyper-individuals fueling a “me-first” social Darwinism?

In relation to writing, though, I think play is important not only because it can invite engagement within the zone of proximal development, but because of its affordances (Gibson 1989). In this sense, I make a differentiation between “consequential” and “inconsequential” types of play (following Barab & Roth 2006, Barab, Sadler, Heiselt, Hickey, Zuiker 2006). For play to always afford engagement within a ZPD, the players must take their play as having real effects; their actions within the bounds of play must produce results that they perceive as having meaning. An outsider may see the play as all completely irrelevant, but that does not matter. What matters is the “-emic” perspective.

Take, for example, academics. Many students see the academic system and their daily classrooms as inconsequential. The school is a place different from “the real world,” grounded in abstract theory and idealism, not concrete problems and pragmatism. They thus do not fully engage with the problems and challenges presented to them, worrying more about how to “beat the system” of this artifice than actually accomplishing the tasks it has laid out for them. To this extent, we can say that learning does, indeed, occur. It may be very high level learning, indeed, but because it tries to step outside the realm of play, it is doomed to failure by the very system it seeks to figure out.

However, in consequential play, the player has a stake in the outcome of the game. She sees her actions as meaningful and may even see the rules as necessary, if not “natural.” This approximation of play and nature is important, since it is by this route that we often 1) devalue play in relation to academic or other forms of “work” and 2) fail to notice the ways play is socially organized. I will get to how consequential play affords engagement in a bit, First, though, let me elucidate this point about play and nature.

First, conventional play theory usually defines play as "not serious," opposed to "work," or a quality rather than a discrete activity. However, play theory and education have a long history. Playing is seen as a mode of learning, perhaps the mode by which we humans learn. However, there are some points to make here. First, defined as antithetical to work or other activities or qualities, play becomes a cultural construct. What is play in one culture or society is work in another. Even across individuals, this definition of play yields to relativism. Second, it is assumed that "play" is somehow a basic component of human development. This second point is potentially radical in its implications and I don't mean to disparage them. However, with this all too brief a sketch, we can see the naturalistic tendencies of the way "play" has been used in Western educational theory. Moreover, we can also see the problems this poses if we take play as a cultural construct.

So, do we need to revise play theory? Is play a strong basis for human development or just a weak one? Intuitively, I would say that play is, indeed, a fundamental attribute of learning and development in both humans and non-human animals. However, "play" might be redeemed as an activity is we put it in relation not to an objective set of criteria, but in relation to a surplus of meaning in an organism's environment. Thus, we arrive at Gibson's affordances: an environment always contains affordances for play, but those affordances are differential according to the organism's ability. A pen might contain affordances for grasping and marking surfaces, but if the organism has no appendage with which to grasp, the affordance is moot. Similarly, an optical illusion might contain affordances for tricking one's perception until one has seen the image enough to know the trick.
Once we are conscious of being played with, the game becomes inconsequential. What matters is the surplus of meaning -- the excess of meaning that we struggle to make sense of, yet must fail in our attempts. This is the real meaning of play and its real importance. With out such surplus, we react to a finite set rather than an infinite one. And a finite set can be manipulated and rigged.

Pilamiyaye!

I give thanks to whichever techno-spirits have rushed to my aid recently. After two days without my PowerBook, I rebooted and, voila!, the screen lights up -- a beautiful sight for sore eyes! My friend says her family thinks Macs can be moody... I dunno. I've seen the reverse to be true.

Anyway, mock interview today. No time to blog about Ulrich Beck just yet!

Crash!

My Powerbook isn't feling well, so I had to borrow my mother-in-law's Dell Latitude. Luckily I had already sent out my writing sample to MTU earlier, so I'm good with that. Nothing I *need* it for until next semester. However, I'd like to have access to my files. The Mac store opens at 10, but my son has a ballet recital at 10:30. Even if I get it in right at 10, the guy can't promise me he can figure out what's wrong before we leave for Minneapolis on Friday. Long story short, I'm going to wait until we get to Minneapolis and fix it there. Maybe it'll work itself out.

I'm pretty happy with the MTU sample, too. ("Hear me, baby, hold together."). Anyway, I had planned to to talk about Ulrich Beck, but that will have to wait.

Happy Solstice! Honor the Light

Bruno Latour and Ecocomposition

This is probably too geeky a post to even take seriously: I am at home on a Friday night (hey, at least I have kids for an excuse), eating ice cream (Chocolate Shoppe!), watching Clerks II, and blogging about Actor Network Theory. Anyone have the number for Beauty & the Geek ? Anyway, as I promised...

Latour may be one of our most ecological thinkers. He's certainly keen on the role of rhetoric in contemporary knowledge if, by rhetoric, one means the techne as descended not from Aristotle and Cicero, but through the sophists. But sophistry does not equal ecological... at least I think.

Anyway, Latour wants to bring the sciences into democracy and he wants to do so by acknowledging nature in our society. So, it's not so much that Pasteur "discovered" germs as that he figured out a way to elicit a conversation about the phenomena surrounding them. In short, science is socially constructed and if science is just a social convention, then we only have accepted narratives about nature, not "objective" knowledge.

So, ecocomposition is all the more important because nature is a construct. It is the conventional patterns of language by which we deal with existence, not trees and rocks themselves. The more we know about this language by which we deal with existence, then, the more we know about "nature."

Astute readers might notice the swarm of logical conundrums in the above paragraph: does language refer to anything? Does "existence" imply a physical reality? How does language relate to something "in itself" and is that ratio something we can rely on? And, does this imply that discourse is all there is; some ultimate force "between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere. Yes, even between the land and the ship"?

Yeah, that's where it bogs down for me. I agree language mediates reality for us, thus making it impossible to ever claim to know "reality," but I don't accept this as a reduction to language, which by the very constructionist thinking is also ultimately unknowable. Following the postmodern thinkers who returned to Kant, there are concepts that are supersensible. Perhaps "nature" is one. Experience of nature, then, is noumenal rather than phenomenal. And this, I would venture to say is Latour's point. In The Politics of Nature, Latour argues that we can *all* go outside Plato's cave thereby affirming routes to the supersensible beyond scientific reasoning. This gets more of society working on understanding "nature," thus allowing nature greater representation in what Latour calls the Assembly.

I'm inclined to follow Latour as an ecological thinker. He certainly is important for anyone in scientific and technical communication to understand. However, politically, he's nuts. Given the world and the power investments in circulation today, Latour's political divisions are cumbersome and unpractical. Not that unpractical ideas are bad -- they just offer hope for the future rather than solutions for the present. I like that Latour gives, in theory, room for intelligent designers, but what hedge is there in Latour against a consolidation of their route to the noumenal?

Ecocomposition and activity theory

Ecocomposition can be horribly misunderstood. To paraphrase Arlene Plevin, it is more than just smuggling in a few texts about trees. Yet more and more, we are beginning to understand writing as an ecological endeavor. By this, I do not mean "context." Marilyn Cooper made that fairly clear in 1988. Rather than an abstract set of categories operating on writing, the act of writing itself generates such categories in specific configurations. Writing becomes shaped by these things in a kind of feedback loop -- a dynamic interaction between writing and the world.

This is different from the ways others have theorized complex networks of writing. Yjro Engrström, for example, proposed this diagram
to describe any act of communication. Engeström's model follows activity theory. Stemming from Vygotskyian psychology this understands consciousness not a separate from the environment, but in relation to it. As such, it goes quite a great deal toward establishing an ecological system in which a consciousness uses socially given symbols in an attempt to accomplish a goal within that system. Since the system is social, the accomplishment of a goal requires the enlistment and coordination of others; it is thus an activity rather than an action.

It is also true that this system is dynamic and not static. Bakhtin's concept of refraction holds that the system is necessarily changed with each utterance. However, the environment in such theories is limited to the social. As in social construction, there is no recourse to an outside reality, or, if there is, it is one of physical limitations that impede the social. Amos Hawley's sociological theory of human and natural relationship does just this.

If "nature" just places limits on the social, then is this relevant to writing studies only insofar as nature provides available resources such as ink, papyrus, or silicon? Not quite. Researchers such as Paul Prior might point out how nature constitutes the "artifacts" plane of his pentagonal model. However, such theories are predicated on an exploitative relationship between nature and society. Nature imposes limits that society continually seeks to supersede.

There is, then, an ethical dimension in ecocomposition that activity theory does not address. If writing is a dynamic interaction like a feedback loop, then how can we understand that interaction without resorting to exploitation? This is one of the central concerns of ecocomposition, though not the only one.

Thus, for my dissertation, I wanted to see just how that feedback loop between "nature" and individual writers occurs. So, I selected a course where students actually wrote in as well as about nature. And the most immediate place to see this was in student journals.

Introductions are in Order...

Welcome and all that stuff....

This blog stems from my research as a writing instructor at the University of Wisconsin - Madison where I am in the Ph.D. program in Rhetoric and Composition. While I teach courses in composition and Native American literature, I researched for my dissertation a course that combined both. Students enrolled in this course traveled to various locales in and around the Black Hills of South Dakota, the land sacred to the Lakota people.

What got me blogging, though, were the student journals. The academic papers were pretty typical and they responded to instruction in pretty typical ways. I tried to look at both the writing products and processes by combining participant-observer methods with independent analysis using grounded theory. Moreover, I used a theoretical framework that drew from recent studies in literacy, writing, and learning as ecological activities, namely the New London Group, embodied literacies, and ecocomposition. By coding the journals in relation to my field notes and experience of the trip, I was trying to understand and theorize what students were actually doing with these journals.

The assumption is that journals are places where students begin drafting. Part diary and part commonplace books, academic journal writing is a fairly common assignment for courses in composition, literature, and other courses where writing is a mode of learning. Blogs, of course, are being heralded as the "new journal" mode for student reflection. This may or may not be true - an awful lot of research needs to be done in order to assess such claims.

My position is that such research is warranted, but with special attention to the kinds of reflective activities that are assigned. I came to this conclusion through my research because what I saw in student journals was a tendency to really wrestle with ethical, moral, and spiritual questions in ways that largely vanished from their formal responses. To me, this was really exciting since this is often what compositionists argue for in student writing. Here were students actually doing it!

So, in the pages that follow, you'll get some theorizing about how and why I think these students succeeded in their journal writing. Moreover, I hope to make the case to the more tech savvy that very non-technological writing can be just as beneficial. This isn't a critique, since I obviously feel computers and online communities valuable. I intend, rather, that it be a cautionary moment where we can stop and ask ourselves critical questions.