Online Reading

I liked this article. 'Nuff said.

Places, Everybody

I've been thinking about place a lot. Not surprising. My research is all about place. But I've got other thinkers lately, like Ydog. He's got a lot to say about hometowns. And recently while walking through the exhibit hall at 4Cs, I heard someone shout in my direction: "Now there's a man after my own heart!" I looked over and saw a woman looking at me, maybe pointing. The exact details are blurry, but she then said, "Your hat" and I remembered I was wearing my Twins baseball cap. I went over to her and she introduced herself, "Kay Halasek." Turns out she's a big Twins fan, but stranger yet, she's grew up in Owatonna, the small city just down the road from Waseca, where I graduated from high school.

Now, I'm in Iowa, Kay is in Ohio, Jeff in Missouri and generally, at things like 4Cs, we look at and see where someone is now -- who employs them, generally (unless you're a very notable composition scholar who *still* gets the affiliation on his name tag wrong!). This is to say that we often make associations with where folks are for right now. There is, after all a considerable deal of transiency (word?) in our profession and this often tells us very little about that person except that they are able to hold a job at University of X where the scenery/ weather/ shopping is Q, or that are brave/ talented/ lucky enough to self-label as "Professional Independent Scholar." What we don't see is where the person is from. Sure, where they live now has an immediate effect, but so does where they have been. Take Mina Shaughnesy for instance and how much her hometown of Lead, South Dakota has been seen in her use of frontier metaphors. Where are their roots? How might those early years of figuring out this crazy life have situated that person? Like Kay and I, who might be practically neighbors and never even know it? What kind of insights or revisions might this literal choragraphy reveal?

So, I've created a Google Maps page titled "Hometown Composition" that I invite you all to add to. I hope I have the permissions set right. You will need to search the maps for it, but once you do, please add or change the markers. Click on the green colored link "Hometown Composition" below the names that are listed as the main headings. Jeff and Kay, I presumed yours already.

To Heart or Hate Grading

I got my first stack of papers this week and set out to get at least halfway through over the weekend. Usually, any attempt at tackling the majority of a stack leaves me wiped out and grumpy. However, this weekend, I had almost all Saturday to pace myself while the family was at the Renaissance Festival (the font while loading is the best part of the page, I think). As I graded, I realized "Hey, I like this." And then I had to ask why I liked it. Usually, as Nedra Reynolds points out in her book, Portfolio Keeping, I am one of those professors who really doesn't like that part of the job. I'd rather just sit and talk about the writing and what the student can do to improve it, like a tutoring session. Alas, students want written comments and, I think it provides a record of my reactions we can both reflect upon at the end of the semester when they argue about what they learned and I distribute grades.

So, there I was, totally jazzed about grading. Only I realized was doing more than that. The essays my students wrote provided me with an opportunity I hadn't really gotten in the first two weeks of class. I got to sit down with them and know them through their writing. I wasn't rushed into evaluative mode, but, rather, settled into a mode that was open to their texts, their voices, and the choices they made as they wrote.

Sadly, this didn't last as long as I hoped it would. After I graded half the papers, I had to grade the rest in smaller increments during the week. That meant under more time pressure -- after conferences with the students whose papers I had already completed, in between teaching classes, or -- more often -- in front of the TV after the kids had gone to bed. I tried to remain as open and relaxed about the grading process, but I don't think I accomplished that. I felt more quick to judge and less accountable to each student as an individual. I still graded on the same criteria and often pointed out many of the same things in the last half of papers, but somehow I feel the quality of my responses didn't match their predecessors. I'll have to grade the next stack in reverse order from this one.

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.