teaching research shouts community ab home

ain't nothin changed...education and technology and medicine and prisons and politics is still jim crowed

a teaching philosophy...

Faculty in both Technical Communication and Rhetoric/Composition programs teach from the same exigence, regardless of what seem to be major differences in pedagogical goals. Both areas place faculty in two constant and almost ridiculous binds: having to choose between The Word and Technology, between being and remaining true to a developing tradition of critique and providing students with the means with which they can gain access to the university and the workplace.

These seeming contradictions, between realities of access and transformative ideals, are exactly where the challenges and rewards lie for me in writing instruction, as few other academic areas are forced to deal with them. Teaching students to communicate in widely varying physical and virtual spaces, then, must be about both teaching them what they will need to succeed in those spaces, and the traditions of critique across several cultural and political contexts that have led many to attempt to transform them. The commitment to stand in, and wrestle with, these contradictions leaves me attempting to synthesize design, literacy, and the rhetorical in ways that are not always comfortable.

I brought all of these issues together in a class I taught last summer for First Year students entering science and engineering programs at Penn State. In a six-week course, I was asked to address everything from writing skills to academic survival skills to cultural and social issues Latino/a and African American students would face while at the university. Of course, those who asked me to teach the course had little idea how such a course should look, or even, what “skills” these students would need. I called the course I designed “Transformative Access: Race, Writing, and Technology,” later borrowing part of my dissertation title from it. We read across all kinds of disciplines, from architecture to NSF statistics on minority graduate degree earners in engineering and the sciences, to Alondra Nelson’s edited collection Technicolor that examined everyday uses and transformations of individual technologies, regardless of larger problems of unequal access.

I framed the course with a first week in which we read Villanueva’s Bootstraps: From An American Academic of Color and Gilyard’s Voices of the Self, pushing the students to understand communicative excellence as knowing the conventions of every space in which they want to communicate well enough to employ and change them as they see fit. Villanueva and Gilyard helped me to emphasize the need for the students always to feel at home in language, with technologies, in their majors, and at Penn State. I wanted them never to see success in any of those places as a matter of having to choose between individual identity, cultural identity, and academic or professional identity.

Keeping in mind the fact that my students were in classes all day, five days a week with less than a weekend to celebrate their high school graduations I wanted to keep the course fun even as I kept it rigorous. To that end, and keeping with my continued focus on rhetorical and technological access and transformation, I made the capstone assignment of the course a technology redesign project: a lowrider computer. The legacy of Chicano/a, Latino/a, and later African American youth in completely changing the form and use of cars and car culture became a metaphor for what I wanted them to do with computers, and by extension, their experiences in their majors and the university. In addition to redesigning a computer from the processor out to the case, I required that students make the language of their essays describing the redesign match the redesign itself—their new computer’s style, the creator’s individual and cultural identities.

As a result, for six weeks, at least, students were able to play with languages and technologies, participate in them, change them, and come to voice. They were challenged. They were taught what their Composition courses would expect of them. And they were able to do all of this in a space that embraced who they were—even as they still worked to figure it all out. One student’s redesign took the hyperbolic tendencies found in African American and Latino/a popular cultures and used that theme to reverse the trend in many technologies toward miniaturization, designing a computer that was a large and wonderful status symbol taking up an entire room of a house, but all made up of “vintage” spare parts. Green design and style and technology and African American, Latino/a people in the conversation—imagine that.

Some descriptions of current and recent courses...


Fall 2006 WRT 424 Contemporary African American Rhetoric

WRT 424: Where Do We Go From Here? Contemporary African American Rhetoric
Forty years after the landmark victories of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, the debate and dialogue that has always taken place about the future of African American freedom struggle has become more urgent and more public. This course will examine those debates and that dialogue, looking at the range of strategies and opinions that inform it, but it will also explore the sites where that dialogue takes place and the ways that rhetors deal with the conventions and constraints that those sites exercise on rhetorical production.

How do people trying to energize the HipHop generation frame the arguments that can motivate them to action? How does--or can--the African American sermon act as an instrument of liberation? How do activists and policymakers place African American issues on the agenda in a public discourse shaped by the assumption that racism no longer exists? How do Black athletes function in an environment that has always attempted to reduce Black humanity to its most stereotyped and cliche'd forms? Finally, how do African American academics work to influence change both inside and outside the ivory and ebony towers?

This course will not only study the dialogue and debates and the strategies others employ across these various sites (the academy, the church, sports, entertainment, and activism), but it will encourage us to enter the conversation ourselves. Students in the course will plan and participate in a campus and community dialogue, write a rhetorical analysis paper, and a research paper.

Course texts will include:
Smiley, Tavis, ed. The Covenant With Black America.
Marable, Manning, ed. The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology of Critical African American Studies.
Bynoe, Yvonne. Stand and Deliver: Political Activism, Leadership, and HipHop Culture.
Haskins, James. Keeping the Faith: African American Sermons of Liberation.
Zirin, Dave. What's My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States.


WRT 307 Professional Communication

Workplace writing is so much more than just what format you need for a particular report or what sections an email memo should include. There are all those conventions to be aware of, but professional writing is all about the ability to convey very detailed, sometimes highly technical information to many different audiences, often with different and even conflicting needs. It’s about being able to communicate with groups you may have had little or no exposure to. It’s about being aware of the culture, the relationships, and even the politics or your work environment and knowing how to navigate them all effectively. It’s about having to collaborate with people across departments, disciplines, and even companies on documents and projects. It’s about having to master new subjects at a moment’s notice. It’s about design and visual issues as much as it is about textual ones. Finally, it’s about having to communicate in a ridiculously wide range of communication spaces, electronic, print, face to face and more.

Course Overview:
This course is designed to prepare you for the wide range of writing you will be expected to in the workplace by focusing on developing your rhetorical sensitivity to the contexts, audiences, purposes, and conventions that surround any writing task and by teaching you to adapt to the flexibility that workplace writing demands. You will learn the particular conventions of genres from the memo, letter, and resume to the progress report and web site, but you will also learn how to read contexts and audiences in order to craft documents that focus entirely on meeting those audiences’ needs. Finally, this course places a focus on both print and electronic communication, and will help you to become more comfortable in each, and able to switch easily from one to the other.

Course Texts:
Lay, Mary, et. al. Technical Communication. 2nd edition.
Eilola, Johndan Johnson and Stuart Selber. Central Works in Technical
Communication.


Spring 2006 WRT 426/CCR 651 Afrofuturism

http://www.syracuseblackodyssey.com Check out the site from the Syracuse Black Odyssey conference we hosted last May

Course Overview: “Just ACT like you free!” was a familiar refrain in one of my community courses—a testament to the desire of many African Americans to imagine Black lives beyond the constraints of racial, class, and gender oppression. This class will take up that refrain by reversing the wisdom of Sankofa: instead of “going back to reclaim our past so we can move forward,” we will look forward to a Black future to then look back and reclaim the past and present.

What happens if we begin with the assumption of freedom and then work back? What would that futuristic space look like, feel like, smell like, sound like? What would be different about Black life? About America? About the world? How can that focus on the future rather than the difficulties of the past and present change our perspectives on how to pursue racial justice now? We will examine all of these questions and explore their relationship to language, literacies, and technologies.

If we’re focused on the future, how does that change education? How should we imagine technology access? How do we carry those messages to those who have been denied access? What does a call for a Black technological renaissance demand from us? How should African Americans—and the larger society—engage the theories, discourses, and practices of technologies? What are the possibilities and the limits of technologies in African American activism, advocacy and everyday life? How should technologies themselves be reimagined, redesigned, to reflect African American uses, needs, and culture? How will these “freedom dreams” lead us to rethink our intellectual work? Our discipline?

Students in the course will lead class discussions, make a class presentation on at least one relevant book or technological tool, create their own Afrofuturist anthology, and write a course paper. Students will present their work in an end-of-the semester symposium. Some class sessions will take place off campus.

Texts

Derrick Bell, Afrolantica Legacies
Adam Banks, Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground
Alondra Nelson, ed. Technicolor: Technologies of Everyday Life
Alondra Nelson, ed. Afrofuturism: A Special Issue of Social Text, July 2002
Bruce Sinclair, ed. Technology and the African American Experience
Carrol W. Pursell, ed. A Hammer in Their Hands: a Documentary History of Technology and the African American Experience
Timothy Jenkins, Khafra K Om-Ra-Seti. Black Futurists in the Information Age: Vision of a 21st Century Technological Renaissance
Sheree Thomas, ed. Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora
Thioune, Ramata Molo, ed. Opportunities and Challenges for Community Development: Information and Communication Technologies for Development in Africa
Weheliye, Alexander. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity

fall 2005

WRT 424
Spoken Soul: Black Oral Traditions and Literacies on the ONE

We will survey the range of Black oral traditions in the US, from folktales to blues and spirituals to HipHop to sermons, standups, and spoken word poetry. In addition to examining the forms and content present throughout the tradition, we will look at ways Black traditions, and knowledge of them, can help to ground literacy instruction in schools, prisons, community centers, and other sites.

This course is, in important ways, a tribute to the late Professor Columbus (Ted) Grace, who built his scholarly, teaching, and community work around the concept of ONE--Oral Narrative Engagement--around the idea that Black oral traditions can be transform literacy instruction for Black students and all students.

Come learn about signifyin, toastin, snappin, dozens, the griot, the DJ, Bernice Johnson Reagon and Sweet Honey in the Rock, movement music, call and response, Ebonics, masking, trickster figures, the blues, spirituals, sermons, Chris Rock, Moms Mabley, Richard Pryor, Dick Gregory, Rev. C.L. Franklin, Vashti McKenzie and much more. Get introduced to some of the scholarship around these traditions and African American literacies. Perform folktales, spoken word poetry and other genres.

ETS 510
Critical Race Theory

With the realization that the salvation of racial equality has eluded us again, questions arise from the ashes of our expectations: How have we failed—and why? What does this failure mean—for Black people and for whites? Where do we go from here? Should we redirect the quest for racial justice….How are we to assess the unstable status of a struggle that all but the most perversely pessimistic predicted would end in triumph many years ago.

Derrick Bell, _And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (1987).

summer 2005

WRT 100
Live from the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe: a Writing Studio