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.

Observations

While my posts have slagged off a bit, I'm still here. I just have to deal with my performance evaluation -- a lengthy document that assembles my 2.5 months of experience at UNI into a narrative of progress toward tenure. There are three broad areas: Teaching, Research, and Service.

While I am assigned to 2 departmental committees, they have yet to meet. However, I am conducting a "listening tour" in regards to perceptions of writing on campus. So far, I have met with the Director of Writing Programs, colleagues in the department, the department chair, the Director of the Writing Center, and - tomorrow - the Dean of the College. Not bad for service, eh?

Research is similarly hefty: a book review due out in JAC, an abstract for a chapter in Writing the Earth: Rhetorics and Literacies of Sustainability, and acceptance to next spring's 4Cs.

Teaching is always the tricky bit, isn't it? Not that I have nothing to show for my teaching. I think I have plenty, but the question is, will my observers see it? And, to be clear, there are worse alternatives than the observations required here. I *do* get to write my own narrative that clues my observer's in to my pedagogical philosophy and, hopefully, things they should look for. Plus, after this year's assessment, the observations are also seen alongside those dreaded student assessments administered via bubble sheets at the end of the semester. I can also take liberties to create my own assessment tools to supplement (or offset) these other tools (especially the bubble sheets which, given my high general education load, hold potential to be especially damaging). Starting with year two, then, there is a greater emphasis on holistic measures. So, I'm not griping. I am, however, being self-reflexive.

For me, teaching is a lot about knowing when to step out of the way. It also isn't something confined to the classroom. But here I am arranging for the required observations and I have qualms about the very notion of teaching upon which it is predicated -- largely a lecture-based "performance" whose first act begins at the top of the hour and comes to a curtain call fifty-minutes later. How do we generate an awareness -- with our students, colleagues, administrators, and even in the wider public -- that good teaching often takes place behind the scenes, so to speak? What, exactly, indicates "good teaching"? Does it always appear within the confines of the classroom? For that matter, where is "the classroom" located?

Animal Communication

Has it really been that long since I posted? Wow! Lots has happened, though: a new job, house hunting (unsuccessful so far), another chapter done... now if I can just finish grading papers by tomorrow.

Until then, I was watching Nature again, this time about cephalopods, those foot-headed protoypes for Cthulhu. Anyway, some species communicate through rapid color changes in skin pigmentation. This reminded me of insects and pheremone use, not to mention elephant's ability to register infrasound frequencies. So, with other species, we have ample evidence of systems of communications that are radically different from our own. Or are they?

Applying Gibson's theory of perception, I have to ask if communication is really just an affordance. Since an affordance is some potential that exists in one's environment -- defined so that one's "perceptual array" includes one's own body -- then manipulating the body to signal meaning would be the basis for communication, at least the basic unit.

Of course, this puts the onus on organisms as meaning-making animals and I'm not entirely sure this is an accurate assumption. It implies intent. Even we humans sometimes communicate unintentionally. So, taking ecological perception one step further and seeing other organisms as part of the perceptual field, sometimes affordances themselves (crabs use other organisms and myriad insects see others as good egg laying sites, i.e., seeing them as locations with potential in the environment, not as "food source").

So, with this in mind, we might test whether or not organisms read rather than write. If they do, then the world is abuzz with (pun intended) and literally saturated with meaning. Organisms are still meaning-making but not as intentional. Derrida would be more right than even he might have claimed.

But this isn't really my point since putting this to any kind of testing would be difficult beyond compare. Rather, my point here is that this disrupts writing theory to a large degree, making visual script (just) one more system among systems and, more importantly, less a methodical means to transmit meaning as an elaboration of