Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School

We hereby approve the Dissertation

Aurora Michelle Sturley Matzke

Candidate for the Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

______Director (Dr. Kate Ronald)

______Reader (Dr. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson)

______Reader (Dr. John Tassoni)

______Reader (Dr. Jason Palmeri)

______Graduate School Representative (Dr. Sally A. Lloyd)

ABSTRACT

DISTRIBUTED (UN)CERTAINTY: CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, WISE CROWDS, AND FEMINIST DISRUPTION

by Aurora Michelle Sturley Matzke

This dissertation argues that writing instruction should work toward the inclusion of wise crowd theory and feminist praxis in regard to social networks and theories of community practice. The study of folksonomy, as a way to socially-network communities, and wise crowd theory, the belief that community solutions can be stronger than those of experts, creates an opening for the complication of critical pedagogy. My project uses feminist pedagogical scholarship focused on disruption and resting in uncertainty as a springboard to reposition folksonomy and wise crowd theory as feminist praxis working toward the inclusion of difference in community. Four body chapters focus on defining, outlining, and showing the results of two folksonomic qualitative studies.

Chapter Two, “Folksonomy as a Social System of Knowledge-Making,” begins by defining “social network,” before describing the rhetorical implications of different naming systems enforced through the “tagging” that takes place through social networking. The chapter highlights the issues inherent in the uses of folksonomic spaces and argues the tyranny of the majority has the potential to eclipse if not silence minority voices.

Chapter Three, “Folk, Nomos, and Kairos: Folksonomy as a Feminist Enterprise,” interrogates the “wisdom of the crowd” model for knowledge building. The chapter uses the historical, etymological root words of folk and nomos to rhetorically position folksonomy as a critical theory in line with feminist pedagogy discourse.

Chapter Four, “Wiki’d Up and Ready to Go: CFF Pedagogy, Attempted,” presents the results of a qualitative study I conducted in a graduate course focused on composition and rhetoric pedagogy. The interview-based chapter concludes with a discussion of how teacher-training courses need further change if CFF pedagogy is to be enacted in ways that more fully engage the intelligence of the crowd.

Chapter Five, “Playing with Purpose: Folksonomy in the First-Year Classroom,” outlines the year-long qualitative study I conducted with the help of an instructor of an undergraduate writing course. The chapter argues that CFF pedagogy helps open up discussions of race, class, and gender in productive ways for first-year students, by significantly shifting the power structure within the classroom from the instructor and to the students.

DISTRIBUTED (UN)CERTAINTY: CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, WISE CROWDS, AND

FEMINIST DISRUPTION

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to the faculty of Miami University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

Aurora Michelle Sturley Matzke

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2011

Dissertation Director: Dr. Kate Ronald

Aurora Michelle Sturley Matzke

2011

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE Tracing an Oft-Drawn Line: Critical Pedagogies in the 21st Century…………………….1-16

CHAPTER TWO Folksonomy as a Social System of Knowledge-Making………………………………….17-54

CHAPTER THREE Folk, Nomos, and Kairos: Folksonomy as a Feminist Enterprise……………….………...55-93

CHAPTER FOUR Wiki’d Up and Ready to Go: CFF Pedagogy, Attempted………………..….……………94-131

CHAPTER FIVE Playing with Purpose: Folksonomy in the First-Year Classroom.………………………...132-183

CHAPTER SIX The Business of the Network, Attempting to Teach, and Other Threads…………………184-190

WORKS CITED ……………………………………………………………………………………………..191-200

APPENDICES A-I ……………………………………………………………………………………………..201-223

iii

DEDICATION

To Mark—for all he was, is, and will be to me, now and forever.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Miami University was a revelation to me. As a learner, scholar, and teacher, I could not imagine a better community from which to grow. From the first day of the first class, where I was introduced and encouraged to interact with new students hailing from creative writing, literature, and composition and rhetoric; seasoned students leading pedagogy workshops; and faculty eager to listen to my ideas, questions, and plans, Miami challenged me in ways that required me to stretch, adapt, and above all ask the questions, “To what end?” and “For what purpose?”

Dr. Kate Ronald: friend, mentor, sage, and guide. A boundless feminist rhetorician, Kate teaches me to listen to my community, affectionately interpret what I do not understand, and above all, honor love in the pursuit of changing the world. With honey in her smile, Kate rolls up her sleeves and shows me that serious play is a hard but rewarding mistress.

Dr. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson: an attentive listener and critical practitioner, Cindy has seen my tears, entertained my neuroses, and with kind affection told me to get to work.

Dr. John Tassoni: the man that taught me to say “and” instead of “but.” John’s presence follows me into the classrooms I inhabit, especially in the ways I enact my own teaching philosophies.

Dr. Jason Palmeri: kind and thoughtful, a voracious and perspicacious scholar, he worked with me to add ever more complexity to my research.

Sonya Parrish, Lynn Hall, Bre Garrett: just three of the women with which I have shared laughter, hardships, wine, and food. I cannot imagine Miami without my women. You teach me to believe I have something worth saying; are patient with me when my throat is closed in frustration; and comfort me when nothing else will do. The level of support you all provide me is astounding and humbling. As we racketed around this tiny town in the middle of cornfields and endless horizon, you imbued my life with stability and grace. Thank you, my wonderful friends.

Mom, Jessica, Christianna, and Andrea: without reservation, pause, or thought, you are sure I am right, they are wrong, and the world would be better if everyone would just get out of our way. What would I have done out here without the phone calls, videos, pictures—the quiet assurance of your love? My family, my heart, all for which I yearn, the strength of my resolve comes from our turbulent youth, the slow progress toward adulthood, and the constant companionship we share today. No matter where I go, or what I do, you remind me I am just me.

Mark: humble, gentle, and strong. What faith, to move east, away from everyone and everything, for a desire I barely understood. What kindness, to support me through this process with neither complaint nor voiced regret. What love, to hold me at night and tell me everything would be okay. My best friend, quiet companion—my life, richer for you.

Chapter One Tracing an Oft-Drawn Line: Critical Pedagogies in the 21st Century A Short, Crooked Timeline In a modern history of composition and rhetoric topoi that conceptualize the classroom, many well-known theories—pragmatic, liberatory, feminist, and dialogic—draw attention to notions of power. Inherent in these discussions of power and uncertainty in the classroom are also discussions of available spaces—the places students and teachers can or cannot speak/write with/in/toward or enact personal/communal change. A short historical timeline might begin by highlighting the work of scholars Jane Addams and John Dewey. Both rhetoricians call for education to focus on the available civic spaces, through Addams’ “social claim” and Dewey’s “civic efficiency.” These ideas find life throughout Paulo Freire’s work on “conscientização,” reinvented by compositionists as teaching for “critical democracy,” a pedagogy aimed at fostering change through learning environments. Such an aim is shared by bell hooks work, as she pushes for “progressive learning” and “democratic education” in which she seeks to disrupt domination and infuse communities with the magic of hope. As practitioners of pragmatism, critical practice, or feminism, the above authors all attempt to change available space and hegemonic power structures. These theories—although from different perspectives—are primarily engaged with negotiating power and self in relation to available space, as it either enables or hinders human learners in the processes of critical thought and action. Despite differences, they represent scholars engaged with how individuals work, play, and rest in the homepoints of their lives in relation to learning that prods critical change focused on race, class, and gender. Charles Sanders Pierce conceived of “pragmaticism” as a system based on conception (Pierce). Pierce’s pragmaticism relied on the insistence that meaning and truth come from the widest possible experience, that a combined knowledge is the truer knowledge, and that fallibilism, uncertainty, and community are the key methods of investigation employed by the learner (Pierce). Pierce’s pragmaticism relies on the ability to conceive—to form, to imagine. It is not necessarily interested in global change or even local knowledge; it’s an attitude toward and a method of developing the “truest” and “best”: a method contingent on change and additional experience, as meaning is shaped by the conceptions of those who conceive (Ronald).

John Dewey took Pierce’s pragmaticism and developed it with a focus on education as both intrinsically social and self-driven. Dewey believed attempting from the outside to label, catalogue, and drive the needs of a learner blocked the opportunity for real growth to take place. Dewey argued this cataloguing inevitably places students in a position where learners are viewed, not as representing a whole self, but as incomplete beings in need of filling.1 In section four of Dewey’s 1916 Democracy and Education, or “Conditions of Growth,” Dewey reminds educators that lack, or the prefix –im can be connoted positively: “Our tendency to take immaturity as mere lack, and growth as something which fills up the gap between the immature and the mature is due to regarding childhood comparatively, instead of intrinsically. We treat it simply as a privation because we are measuring it by adulthood as a fixed standard. This fixes attention upon what the child has not, and will not have till he becomes a man” (49, emphasis mine). Dewey, here, does not suggest students have nothing to learn, nor does he suggest teachers have nothing to share—and neither do I. Instead, Dewey focuses on the problem with setting mastery standards divorced from the true intrinsic nature of education, from the social understanding of self, present and growing in all learners. For Dewey, the process of maturation is dynamic and ever-present; lack is not something to excise but to explore. In Dewian theories, play, work, and education are intimately linked. To be at play is to do more than just engage in pure physical movement; to play is to try to do something or to try to effect something and involves anticipation: “The anticipated result, however, is rather a subsequent action than the production of a specific change in things. Consequently, play is free, plastic” (238). The essential trait of play is not mere amusement nor aimlessness. Rather, it is the fact that the aim and activity are one and the same, and the decision to continue in a certain action is not in reference to the observed results of the previous activity. As activities grow more complicated, gain greater meaning, and consciously become attended to in terms of consequences, they gradually become work. In “Play and Work in the Curriculum,” Dewey argued, “Work which remains permeated with the play attitude is art” (242). Of course, what is education in composition and rhetoric, if not, as Dewey states, an attempt to engage in the art of the writing to investigate situations “where problems are relevant to the problems of living together, and where observation and information are calculated to develop social insight and interest”

1 The reader can see how a discussion of Deweian theories of learning dovetails explicitly with Paulo Freire’s own work on learning. 2

(226)? That is, one of the main goals of writing education is to teach students how to use, find, and develop ideas, knowledge, and observable data in order to better find, understand, and complicate our places, spaces, and importance in relation to others. While Dewey argues in “The Nature of Method” that the method of education is to employ subject matter most effectively for use by learners, “the effective direction of subject matter to desired results,” learning is also individualized—derived from the observation and reflection of experiences (193-203). And, the characteristics of good method are straightforwardness, open- mindedness, integrity of purpose, and the “acceptance of responsibility for the consequences of one’s activity, including thought” (193-203). Method is never outside of the material, never outside of the available means of play and work in education. In other words, in order for people to have fulfilling learning experiences, all learning must take place in relation to the building of local knowledge used to influence physical and intellectual change and growth that will matter to the individual engaged in a community. Unfortunately, the problem Dewey cites above (where lack is viewed as an extrinsic problem of youth and inexperience that must be solved) is an all too common reality in today’s US education system—with the almost rabid call for state-, if not nation-wide standards that can be easily named and ticked off on an ETS spreadsheet. These types of requirements have the unfortunate and monumental side effect of reinforcing a binary between students and teachers, a binary not so easily broken, even at the graduate level. In other words, students perceive themselves in relation to coursework, and at times educators, as merely lacking, regardless what our individual teaching practices or philosophies might be, or the projects students take on in and out of the classroom. The focus on meeting or exceeding expectations in relation to standards that are determined outside or beyond local context hampers the ability of learners and teachers to perceive the uses of such standards in local contexts. Pragmatists, like Dewey, believed that meaning resided in consequence. Paulo Freire’s ideas of liberatory learning fall in line with Dewey’s commitment to the intrinsically social nature of education. In Education for Critical Consciousness, Freire highlights the role education can play in political upheaval and growth. Through Freire, intrinsic learning manifests as a desire for social change—for liberation of mind and body. Freire argues learners must move beyond adaptation, where “the adaptive person is person as object, adaptation representing at most a weak form of self-defense,” and toward “radicalization” (4). According to Freire, human beings participate in the shaping of history through creation, re-creation, and decision-making—a

process radicalized through an “increased commitment to a predominantly critical, loving, humble, communicative, and positive stance” (9). Freire’s commitment to radicalization sits in direct opposition to motivation that rests in authority. Viewing the learning subject as merely adaptable encourages the teaching subject to understand education as a process characterized by assistance toward objectification. Freire argues “assistencialism” is the primary way by which those in power maintain control over those without power, soothing social pressure for real change by adopting the miens of helpful educators while at the same time fostering “naïve transitivity” (15). Naïve transitivity “is an oversimplification of problems, by nostalgia, and by an underestimation of the common man” (14). Through assistencialism, Subjects are encouraged to understand themselves as Objects who can no more effect real change than the rocks they walk upon. Ultimately, naïve transitivity, “both a cause and effect of massification, a fanaticized consciousness based on emotion without commitment,” crushes education toward critical consciousness under the weight of forced assistance (12). Freire cites the “greatest danger of assistencialism” as the potential “violence of its anti-dialogue,” where assistencialism encourages “silence and passivity to deny men conditions likely to open their consciousness. For without an increasingly critical consciousness men are unable to integrate themselves into a transitional society, marked by intense change and contradictions. Assistencialism is thus both a cause and effect of massification” (12). Therefore in Freirian dialogue, Deweyian pragmatism, if taught from the top-down, leads toward massification—with its emphasis on how the individual can contribute to what is “truest and best.” Indeed, Freire argues the truest and best is nothing more than the subjugators’ assistance of the underclass toward massification. Consequently, assistentialism rests in direct contrast to Freire’s idea of real dialogue. As Freire argued, “Born of a critical matrix, dialogue creates a critical attitude. It is nourished by love, humility, hope, faith, and trust” (40). Love, humility, hope, faith, and trust are all threads in the braided matrix that make up critical thought in Freire’s theories of liberatory pedagogy—a braided matrix taken and rebraided with greater complexity by bell hooks. bell hooks, within Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom and Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, marks two major disruptions in critical pedagogy practiced within the academy brought about by feminists: 1) The disruption of patriarchy through the inclusion of women feminists in positions of power (as teachers) within collegiate education, and 2) The disruption by black women/women of color and white women anti-racist allies of early feminist

practices, in order that critiques of race and racism might be included within feminist studies. These moments of disruption also bring needed feminist and anti-racist force to critical theories of practice that, until bell hooks, were largely circulated and touted by men without in-depth critiques of ways in which feminism might complicate a critical approach. While hooks’ ideas of feminist pedagogy, and the ways in which communities might be urged to engage in critical practice, are discussed with more depth in chapter three, her focus on community, on the ways that not only community but educator must be allowed and encouraged to interact, concentrates on the actual praxis of an American educator working in current systems of power missing from both Dewey and Freire. Complicating Critical Praxis The call that Dewey, Freire, and hooks participate in over time, is a call for more than passive belief in human ability to affect change—they call for educators to pay attention to local people and groups, local spaces and places, artifact use and production. Yet, as Byron Hawk notes in A Counter History of Composition, “One thing liberatory pedagogy tends to sidestep is the fact that students can and do see teachers as embodying the power of law, no matter how much the teacher may genuinely want to help them. Help can be patronizing when distributed downward from a point of authority” (211). If educators are to work against the notion of lack as absence, -im as a problem to be rectified, of the patronizing effect of our “assistance” to the community, we must not suppose we can do it alone, or that we can bring x to the classroom, or operate the classroom in x fashion and sidestep the murky realities of power. Because no matter what our intentions, we as teachers embody law, order, the authority community belief intrinsically notes as outside, apart, and not wholly trustworthy. Therefore, we must look to encourage systems of power that imbue confidence, belief in self, and an appreciation for communal change in students from the inside. Because, as Hawk argues, “a teacher’s pedagogical desires typically have nothing to do with a student’s emergent desires— whether our desires take the form of programs, courses, or subjects” (217). From Dewey to Hawk, continuing growth comes from the student; starting from a standpoint of teacher authority will always loop educators back to the issue of mere lack. So then, where does that leave pedagogues? Since we cannot determine “students’ desires” as stated by Hawk, “we cannot make them need what we think they need,” we must instead support networks of learning that ask learners to teach one another and us (219). We must create opportunities for the groups with which we have been enforcing group work to enact the communities they really are. Because at the roots of even the progressive ideas espoused by Dewey, Freire, and hooks, if the teacher exists, she is always the

sage—if not on stage, then off, as she pulls curtain cords and directs the performance. Writing and argumentation classrooms, whomever they are inhabited by, are sites of (un)certainty, authority, and power. In most learning environments, the teacher exercises control through planning, choreographing the educational dance. Each individual may approach the tasks differently, add their own personal flair, but the performance is controlled, commanded, and judged by the educator. So, what happens when educators explicitly use (pre)mapping as the student, instead of the educator, work of the course? What if an educator opens up the floor of invention to rest throughout a course, instead of using it as a primary means the course moves past? Hawk may critique the lacunae of power and hierarchies in liberatory pedagogy, but his ideas of practice fall short of the promise embedded in his theories of education. Hawk does argue that, “students need to develop their own schemata to fit their particular topics and situations,” yet ultimately this call is finished with the admonishment “that if teachers give the students schemata first, their goal should be to revise those schemata as a part of the invention process rather than to follow them prescriptively” (192). The loop of power eventually again finds root in the practices and understanding of the teacher. And while Hawk believes “such localizing establishes a rhetorical situation for both the students’ and the teacher’s knowledge production,” a “background from which the participants in a class can interpret the poetry and criticism and produce knowledges specific to them individually as well as to the class,” here his ideas still support a coming to knowledge, a filling in of the general with the personal, instead of the reverse—using the individual as a schemata to investigate the general through social locality (226). The background is used to examine the text, instead of the background becoming the text from where the group moves. The call, then, for the individual to participate in social play in order to build localized, useful knowledge, in order to learn, falls more in line with Hawk’s theoretical views, as expressed through his discussion of complex vitalism, where he states that, “Teachers cannot impose a general form on the local because the general form cannot be (pre)mapped” (198). Consequently, relying on opening schemata built with or by students to then investigate assignments or materials provided by the instructor is moving in the right direction, but not far enough. Unfortunately, what Hawk’s discussion of complex vitalism calls for in teaching and learning still seems relatively far off as an overarching practice in composition and rhetoric pedagogy. Because at the same time, as a discipline, Composition and Rhetoric has continuously toiled toward de-centering power relationships, it has also performed experiment after experiment, created

handbook after handbook, and hosted conference after conference centering around the almost seemingly alchemical formula that will result in the magical classroom bullet that will help all students achieve the “effective” rhetorical text. And this effective rhetorical text rests on the hypostases of unity, clarity, correctness, and ultimately, completeness—showing as proof of success the face of certainty and competence in papers, student interviews, and collegial accolades. Effective rhetorical text does not stand or exist alone; it exists in relation to audience and purpose. Searching for, and in a sense accepting, the grail of effective rhetorical text is ultimately arhetorical, because this view of writing and, ultimately, the role of the teacher doesn’t understand a text as having multiple and different audiences at the same time. What accompanies the collegial idea of an “ideal” text is a discourse of power that bequeaths authority to the educator to judge excellence—a model of excellence which flies in the face of how people along a distributed network might understand and receive texts. By trusting in and striving for the “ideal” text, educators, still in charge of the power and authority of the grade, the control of institutional context, may rest easier, knowing they are helping students get “it.” Beyond Completing and Into the Net(Gen)work However, recently, experts like hooks and Hawk, as well as Paul Kameen have begun to challenge the idea of a “complete” text. Moving beyond questions of rewarding effort or contractual grading, these scholars have started to ask what happens when we reward disruption, resting in the fractured subject, encouraging incompletion to highlight uncertainty; moving beyond what Charles Paine would label “inoculation rhetoric” to suggest a point of learning for rhetoric and composition that exists beyond the complete, institutionally authorized text (The Resistant Writer). Of course, the interstitial subject is only drawn in further relief by digital writing practices. As Kathleen Blake Yancey reminds writing educators, “Composing is an activity that is a set of interlayered, intertextured practices that can be facilitated in different ways by different spaces that can be accomplished through new materials and new interlayerings of materials.” The intertextual and interlayering practices that Yancey refers to here, and are present en masse in online writing spaces, call for educators to have many more conversations about multi-purposed writing, multiple, competing audiences, and the uncertain position held by student, text, and teacher in both on- and offline environments. Parallel to classrooms becoming increasingly digitized through teacher stations, laptops, and audio, video, and visual rhetorical productions, digitized environments are quickly becoming one of the major homeplaces of college bound students. Consequently, online

social networking and the theories that explain and complicate these interactive spaces continue to become some of the most important conversations teachers must be part of at all levels of education. Not news to most of us in college writing classrooms, higher education is in the midst of a major influx of several decades of students born into Generation Y—an influx with no clear end in sight. Generation Y, also called “Millennials,” or the “Net Generation” is characterized as the first generation to be born into the affordances of a society running on high internet connectivity, to have always owned compact cell-phones, to watch the rise and fall of the dot com market through grade school, and to be cautioned with tales of the Enron Scandal through high school economics classes (USA Today). Clearly, not all students working toward college degrees are characterized by these very hegemonic, middle-class experiences and standards. However, most, if not all students now come to higher education with the expectation (whether consciously or not) that technologies will play a major role in the ways they interact with their peers, mentors, and administration, and work toward their degree, certificate program, and job placement opportunities. Consequently, most students are technologically aware, if not downright savvy, but jaded regarding whether or not positive participation in society will, in fact, benefit them or those they know and love, making much of their participation in “education for education’s sake” cynically driven, as they look for the bottom line. Of course, writing teachers have investigated social networking sites like Facebook.com, De.licio.us, Youtube.com, and others, in order to critically interact with students in everyday ways that, since Generation Y, Americans—and much of the rest of the world—read, speak, and write on a daily basis. Alice Trupe (2002), Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher (2006), Joseph Moxley (2008), Stephanie Vie (2008), James Porter (2009), Kathleen Blake Yancey (2009), all are examples of teachers looking to explain, examine, and stretch the boundaries of composing spaces through the integration of social-networking. And while many digital scholars have spoken about how social networking can be integrated into the classroom in order to foster communication between students and teachers, expand classroom audiences, and heighten students’ awareness of the arguments made and received moment by moment in online settings, few have argued how these spaces can be used to foster disruption and uncertainty—even fewer have applied wise crowd theory to the ways in which these spaces are imagined. Many of the socially networked spaces used within the classroom are predicated on the wisdom of the crowd—a Web 2.0 organizational model that spawned folksonomic theory. Yet this wisdom,

if unchecked, can reproduce the tyranny of majority over minority through information cascades and bandwagon movements.2 Consequently, Distributed (Un)Certainty highlights how a framework built around feminist disruption might impact current discussions regarding online, socially networked composing/learning/sharing spaces and writing education. The ultimate goal is to highlight work that attempts to foster uncertainty in socially networked classroom environments that take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd, to develop and sustain curricula that requires students and teachers to critique their own educational nomoi. Distributed (Un)Certainty Distributed (Un)Certainty rests on four foundations: classical rhetorical theory, feminist pedagogies, new digital rhetorics, especially those pertaining to folksonomic networks, and person- based, qualitative, classroom research. Like nodes within a network, these four areas, when braided together, generate a connective research environment from where new praxis might be drawn. The research areas within individual chapters of this dissertation will rely on an internetworked understanding amongst all four foundations. For example, in Chapter Two I trace the last 30 years of research surrounding power and authority in online social-networking environments before I move in Chapter Three to layering the current understanding of terms like “folksonomy” together with folk and the Greco-Roman classical rhetorical definitions of nomos and kairos. Consequently, I draw on the work of scholars such as David Batholomae and Anthony Petrosky, bell hooks, Ann Berthoff, Peter Elbow, Cynthia Selfe, Paulo Freire, Mike Rose, and Rhonda Grego and Nancy Thompson throughout Distributed (Un)Certainty, in order that I might deal with the complicated affordances of the many instantiations of critical and feminist pedagogies. Each educator, each study, constitutes a node on a larger interactive social network within the discipline of composition and rhetoric. I map these nodes in order to reimagine how uncertainty has or has not, on the parts of both educator and educated, already been discussed in relation to power and authority in the writing classroom. This remapping needs to occur to draw attention to the lack of student and teacher interaction regarding hypostatic constraints that put pressure on the available nomoi and topoi of the community. Throughout the dissertation, I will define “social network” and give examples of user organized, internet-based social networking sites, before discussing how these sites led to the coining of the

2 Not to mention that many of these online spaces, such as Facebook.com, Twitter.com, and YouTube.com rely heavily on advertising dollars generated through the harvesting of user information; rarely, if ever, do pedagogues pay particular attention to how these advertising spaces might impact or contradict our classroom goals/ideals (perhaps exacerbated by students’ desires to achieve good grades and accolades within educatory environments). 9

term “folksonomy.” After unfolding the evolution of the definition of folksonomy as a theory of organization applied by scholars working in and with digital communities, I will discuss the historical, etymological root words embedded within folksonomy (both folk and a return to nomos) in order to rhetorically complicate folksonomy as a critical theory. These complications help me create a new definition of folksonomy through feminist theories of disruption and give space to discuss examples of how folksonomic spaces enacted through critical and feminist classroom practices might be created both with and without explicit uses of technology. Finally, I close with a brief discussion about what might be gained and lost with, and the pitfalls and problems of, pedagogies enacted folksonomically. Chapter Two: Folksonomy as a Social System of Knowledge-Making In chapter two, I argue that by re-theorizing composition practices through an understanding of the distributed power model present in discussions of social networking, educators might better understand classroom power distribution. A “social network” is broadly defined as the organization and display—either by, with, or for groups or individuals—of discrete pieces of information and objects around specific nodes, terms, or ideas, linked according to purposes or associations with other nodes, terms, or ideas, so that gathered knowledge might be communicated dynamically and effectively between peoples (Gruber 3-5; Hawisher and Selfe 620, 634; Surowiecki; Vie 10-11). Theoretically, social networks enable users to build sustainable communities where the individual has input toward and responsibility for the whole. These communities, then, establish “norms and conventions that regulate behavior,” conventions that “maintain order and stability…[while] reducing the amount of cognitive work” any one individual needs to do in order to participate (Surowiecki 93). Social networks may develop over time due to any number of factors: geography, mutual interest, race, class, gender, economy, just to name a few, or design. Consequently, social networks rely most heavily on the power generated by members individually but wielded in concert with one another. Socially networked spaces are predicated on the wisdom of the crowd and the interactive capabilities of Web 2.0—spaces that created folksonomic theory. Folksonomic theory has continued to evolve as practice and social use has surged on the semantic web. And whether sticking to Thomas Vander Wal’s original classification, expanding the term to include any social network application trying to enable equal control by all community users, or choosing less openly contested terms in order to study sites such as Del.icio.us, Flickr, or Wikipedia, most scholars continually

return to Vander Wal’s initial contribution—folksonomy (Golder and Huberman; Gruber; Mathes; Peterson; Joshua Porter; Vander Wal). However, rarely, if ever, do educators posit how internetworked spaces that do not create a stable classroom community might still be desired by educators. Chapter two of Distributed (Un)Certainty examines the theories and application of distributed, folksonomic power networks in composition classrooms. I argue that by re-theorizing composition practices through an understanding of the distributed power model present in discussions of social networking and wise crowd theory, educators gain new insights regarding power in the classroom. Focusing on social networks and their instantiations of power, then, allows me to revisit well established conversations in composition and rhetoric about power—discussions led by rhetorical educators, such as bell hooks, Nancy Welch, Julie Jung, Byron Hawk, and Ira Shor, as they seek to destabilize the classroom binary of teacher as knower versus student as acolyte through threads of critical, liberatory, and feminist pedagogies. Of course, the uncertain subject is only further emphasized by the continual focus of computers and writing scholars on digital writing practices, demonstrated from Michael Joyce’s 1987 hypertext afternoon: a story to the investigations of international cyberspace literacies completed by Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher in 2006. As I argued earlier, digital scholar Kathleen Blake Yancey reminds writing educators that composing is an interlayered, intertextured activity that can be facilitated in different ways by different spaces, accomplished through new materials and new interlayerings of materials (Writing in the 21st Century). These conversations, led by scholars such as Joseph Moxley in his discussion of the affordances of wiki-based, datagogical communities, ask teachers to open up classroom spaces in order to foster uncertainty and promote richer conceptualizations of audience, purpose, and learning goals for both teachers and students. Chapter Three: Folk, and Nomos, and Kairos: Folksonomy as a Feminist Enterprise In Distributed (Un)Certainty’s third chapter, I introduce a discussion of an ancient understanding of uncertainty as it was and is linked with community knowledge through the work of Susan Jarratt and others. I focus on classical conceptions of folk, nomos, and kairos as fluctuating, self-conscious, community rule building systems based on localized practices. Two of the things a theorist gains when folk is highlighted and studied for a rhetorical genealogy are 1) An understanding of the communal aspect of folk as a pragmatic designation from which to begin investigation, and 2) The resulting questions of relation, control, and power inherent in any local experience of lived

democracy. If something is characterized as (folk)sonomic, one must ask, “In relation to what? Controlled by whom? To what effect?” In order to provoke critical rhetorical insight, these questions must be explicitly answered. It’s not enough to characterize the social network as one of “normal” people or a “community,” as Vander Wal and most digitally bent folksonomic theorists do, because folksonomy implies a conscious understanding of a hypostatic structure that exists outside the community that individuals are either extending or resisting through their participation in the social network (Peterson; James Porter; Joshua Porter). The use of “folk” implies culture that is and is not. And from a pragmatic perspective, it implies an investigation that rests on the revision and possibility inherent within what is or could be. Chapter Three elucidates how critical, feminist theories, as applied toward pedagogy, can explicitly work with social networks maintained folksonomically in two distinct ways: 1) When used to interrogate folksonomy, these pedagogies can question and disrupt the allure of an uncritical folksonomic stance--problematizing the appeal of ignoring what is not in order to praise what is. 2) When combined with folksonomy, these pedagogies can be enacted in such a way as to more critically enter in to the lived experience of individuals by celebrating the wisdom of the social network and repositioning the role of the expert. By offering a new definition of folksonomy through the inclusion of critical and feminist theories and giving examples of how disruptive pedagogies based on critical and feminist classroom practices might be enacted both with and without explicit uses of technology to encourage uncertainty, I hope to encourage educators to consider critical theories complicated through feminist discussions of disruption and lack when they look toward including practices that highlight crowd wisdom in the classroom. Distributed (Un)Certainty continues to push against stable definitions of teacher, student, audience, and effectiveness, asking: What is uncertainty? Where and how has uncertainty manifested in the rhetorical canon and American education? And how can educators use recent research in distributed learning networks to facilitate and grow from uncertain environments? While many liberatory, dialogic, and student-centered practices occur in differing localities, using the flexible framework of folk, nomos, and kairos provides an organized way to engage the interpolation of hypostases across time and space. Because while educators are individually attempting to challenge the hypostases of institutional context (as with Ira Shor), students are not often equally engaged with this work, or these discussions stop at teachers and students in individual classrooms (as with Paul Kameen), or the teacher uses the institutional authority granted by the university to create their own

agenda that may or may not disregard university policies (as with Mike Rose). The classical, rhetorical terms, then, place these differences and challenges side-by-side, in order that they might be examined together, before moving toward a more holistic idea of power distribution in the classroom. Distributed (Un)Certainy next argues for a networked idea of power born from an analysis of online folksonomic spaces and complicated by feminist theories of disruption. Chapter Three also explores the hypostases of well-known theories that attempt to embody liberatory, student-centered, and dialogic pedagogies. Calling on the pedagogical practices of Ira Shor, Nancy Welch, and Julie Jung, I point toward ways the pedagogical practices each scholar uses does or does not ask students to assume uncertain subject positions. What all have only hinted at is the actual enactment and teaching/learning practices that foster interstitial teacher/student positions—places amongst and between the hypostases where gaps might be found and used in order to create spaces encouraging uncertainty. I argue that attention to a new uncertain space that allows both student and teacher to investigate difference might be made available if more attention were paid to purposefully fracturing the identities of both student and teacher in classroom experiences by collaboratively making and challenging classroom curricula. I argue the positionality of the writing act is instantiated through a community hypostasis determined largely by the instructor, seen in the nomoi of the classroom and the topoi of the writings produced by and with students—for example, when Shor requires students to read Walden, even after years of student protestations. The undergirding of the classroom as translated into practices by the instructor really determine what students can and cannot write, how students do and do not write, and largely what students do and do not think about in relation to the curricula. If we want to open the available means to students, we need to address the hypostases of these educatory settings. Chapter Four: Wiki’d Up and Ready to Go: CFF Pedagogy, Attempted In this chapter, I’ll share an instance of a teaching group that, with the best intentions, tried to institute a digital folksonomic space in the classroom in order to encourage students to take more ownership and control over the theories, ideas, and classroom practices with which they were being asked to engage. This folksonomic space was an attempt to not only have students, as folk, create, change, significantly shape, and more critically engage with nomoi of their own, but for the educators in this space to enact feminist disruption—to challenge the gatekeeping of the nomoi of the folk.

The pilot study referred to within this chapter worked to push beyond the “wise crowd” that graduate students so often embody in an effort to pay attention to what is left behind when wise groups make decisions. In other words, we attempted to rest in uncertainty, pushing the learning space into a conclusion-less place in order to enact feminist pedagogies that highlight lack and disruption. To this end, two educators created a graduate student wikispace designed to allow moments of invention and disruption to merge feminist practices with folksonomic ones. And while the wikispace was not as effective at helping students reimagine their roles in the classroom as we, the instructors, could have hoped, overall the model of interaction suggests a very different method of engaging with folksonomy than is usually touted by most digital educators working in and with digital spaces. The integration of the wiki space failed to work disruptively for some students, authority was often re-inserted into some discussions/memories of working with the wiki, and not all students were willing to see the lack of concision and clarity as an opportunity for more open communal invention. Despite these difficulties, the narrative I’ll share, through the IRB approved collection of student interviews, classroom practices, completed work, and the investigation of the online space itself, does show pockets of understanding the likes of which we, as the instigators of the study, wanted to encourage in students and from which we can build more concretely in the future. Chapter Five: Playing with Purpose: Folksonomy in the First-Year Classroom Chapter Five provides an in-depth look at a year-long study of 68 people enacting feminist, disruptive pedagogy in the first-year writing classroom—practices fostering uncertain teacher- student relations and calling the hypostases of these communities into question. In the fall of 2009, an educator invited me into his classroom as a participant observer, in order that we might assess student reactions to feminist, folksonomic pedagogy in the writing classroom. Specifically, José and I studied how student interpretations of assignment and class purposes developed as students interacted with José, the materials, and one another in order to shape new, student created assignments based on their own desires and projected needs as students. José then used student created assignments and rubrics in his spring 2010 course as I again worked as a participant observer. My research called for me to evaluate the student created assignments in conjunction with audio-taped paper presentations, written reflections on both the writing process and the delivery of their ideas to their peers, and participant interviews. As I conducted interviews with José, we focused on his knowledge base and his understanding of himself

as an educator and the purposes of his writing and literature course in conjunction with the materials submitted by the students. As I interviewed several students, we talked about how uncertainty, power, and disruption played parts in the educatory environment, and how these ideas factored into their understanding of the roles of both student and teacher. I also paid attention to student understanding of course goals and objectives when students were given the chance to reflectively create their own assignments. Together, José and I hoped to further challenge the binary of teacher as sole-knower and student as sole-learner by paying attention to the following:  What students thought of current first-year writing assignments, including both student interest in, and accessibility of, the course work.  How students’ current needs and desires could be used toward instructor development.  More clarity involving potential student development of classroom assignments, including what students can be expected to contribute and how students want to contribute to creating classroom materials.  Overall summative reflection on student competence in building effective rhetorical contexts in which they can potentially enter.  A better picture of a teacher in process, as they too grapple with knowledge making and power sharing in the classroom.  A map of the ways in which distributed uncertainty might work in action. Conclusion: The Business of the Network, Attempting to Teach, and Other Threads This concluding chapter allows space for a frank discussion of not only the ways businesses use many online applications to harness the wisdom of the crowd—and how this might affect instructors’ decisions to include these spaces in their own curricula—but also the difficulty in attempting innovative, critical pedagogy without support from colleagues, departments, or universities. I argue that crowd theory, and the folksonomic projects currently inundating public web spaces, make it impossible for responsible classrooms to follow state or nationally determined teaching templates focused on “student-centered” curricula and expect stellar results. Or, in fact, to push digital constructs into the classroom—folksonomic or not—and expect that the classroom, the way participants interact, the work that gets done, and the way the educator approaches the learning space, will be any different than before the room was wired. I next argue that most practitioners famous for their implementations of critical work feature as solo instructors on a wide landscape, a detriment to new teachers looking to try out these same goals. While famous educators like Ira Shor and bell hooks work with communities, they seem to be achingly separate from a close body of educators that hold the same ideals or goals. Yet what

most teachers need, especially those who may be new to a discipline and a profession, and many often crave, is an experimentation space. This space should not be confined to their own classrooms, or water-cooler discussions between grading sessions. I conclude this chapter by calling for educators to pay attention to the uncertainties interstitially located in socially networked, folksonomically driven communities, so that teachers might gain further insight into the myriad and complex ways highly disparate folk can enact critical thinking and doing that moves beyond the expert—whether or not these attempts are “successful,” whether or not they are “wise,” looking instead to simply allow these attempts to exist, to question with, alongside, instead of against perceived “ignorance.”

Chapter Two Folksonomy as a Social System of Knowledge-Making Introduction As social interaction continues to change with and around technology, so too do our ways of making and maintaining organization and meaning of knowledge, information, expertise, and ideas. Yet despite changes in communication, what routinely remains is a focus on text— whether that text is auditory, image, alphabetic, or character-based, or a combination of all four of these and more. As a person goes about investigating an idea, she might first Google a new term that turns her to Wikipedia. From there, the researcher might click on a hyperlink at the bottom of a text, taking her to a Youtube video further explaining the concept. From there, she might read the comments of other watchers and be directed to a Facebook page that works with the idea more frequently. So what students might routinely encounter, then, outside of the classroom, are texts largely ruled by the interactive, permeable spaces of the social web. And in response to the widespread use of Internetworked writing spaces in both social and business contexts, writing and rhetoric scholars have sought to integrate interactive modes of discourse into and through coursework, department programs, and scholarship through the inclusion of hypermedia and web-based social networking applications, such as blogs, wikis, and media- sharing sites. In this chapter, I will first briefly define “social network.” This definition will work to provide a frame through which to view some examples of user organized, Internet-based social networking sites and the ways in which writing and rhetoric scholars are speaking about these spaces. I hope to give the reader a few snapshots about social networking that I will use as examples throughout the chapter, and to call to mind the broad scope of research already taking place around the uses of social networking in and out of the classroom. Second, I will then move to the “tagging” that takes place in these spaces and the rhetorical implications of different naming systems. I will explain what tagging is and how these tags shape the materials Internet users encounter. The chapter will then move to explain how different tagging systems might enforce more traditional forms of classification, or allow more non-traditional forms of classification. Third, I’ll turn toward how user-based tagging led to the coining of the term “folksonomy,” as folksonomy is linguistically deployed by scholars to explain emerging organizational models.

Both within the field of information systems and without, the definition has continued to shift and be redefined over time and place—and I discuss these changes. I next take a brief look at the issues inherent in the uses of folksonomic spaces, including the economic models that often shadow, if not overtake, these spaces and explore how the tyranny of the majority has the potential to eclipse if not silence minority voices. Last, I will describe the evolution of the definition of folksonomy as a theory of organization applied by scholars working in and with digital communities, before moving toward a more inclusive, complex definition of folksonomy that might be positioned as a classroom and/or research model where the role of the expert is repurposed for the good of the group. Social Networking Definitions and Scholarship A “social network” is broadly defined as the organization and display—either by, with, or for groups or individuals—of discrete pieces of information and objects around specific nodes, terms, or ideas, that participants then link according to purposes or associations they understand the object or item to have with other nodes, terms, or ideas; these linkages provide the means by which gathered knowledge might be communicated more dynamically and effectively between people (Gruber 3-5; Hawisher and Selfe 620, 634; Surowiecki; Vie 10-11). Theoretically, social networks enable users to build sustainable communities in which the individual has input toward and responsibility for the whole. In Figure One, the reader can see a visual depiction of a social network uploaded by user GUESS to Wikimedia in February 2009. The blue lines show how information is communicated by several different users to a wide network of participants. As the reader will note, nodes clustered around the Figure One: A visual representation of “center” of the network have a greater the nodes in a social network frequency of visits than those nodes located at

the edges of the network. These central nodes often provide a larger number of users with “more useful” pieces of information than those nodes on the outer edges of the community. The heavier and lighter clusters also might represent the boundaries of majority and minority clusters—with majority clusters receiving many more hits than minority clusters. These communities, then, establish “norms and conventions that regulate behavior,” conventions that “maintain order and stability…[while] reducing the amount of cognitive work” any one individual needs to do in order to participate (Surowiecki 93). As new users enter the network, they are most likely to come across the most popular nodes—in this way, new users are immediately introduced to the norms and conventions that regulate behavior in the space. For example, should a person visit en.wikipedia.org (a socially networked encyclopedia developed by millions of users worldwide) that visitor is brought to the Welcome Page. The Welcome Page of Wikipedia hosts the day’s “featured article,” a selection of the “newest articles,” an “on this day” variety of texts, an “in the news” feature, and a search function. And while researchers might first stumble upon Wikipedia through Google, protracted use is likely to take someone first to the Welcome Page. Consequently, new users interested in participating in the crowd project are likely to first click through the availabilities of the home page (articles vetted by the staff of the Wikimedia Corporation) and its extensive search catalogue before adding to the site, while veteran users are likely to use the homepage for daily consumption and addition. Both of these practices, then, create highly referenced nodes as traffic increases with the front page press. Of course, Wikipedia is only one long established veteran of socially networked crowd participation online. Social networks may develop over time due to any number of factors: geography, mutual interest, race, class, gender, economy, just to name a few, or by kairotic accident or design. Digital compositionists such as Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe (2006), Joseph Moxley (2008), and, most recently, Gina Maranto and Matt Barton (2010) represent only a very small fraction of the scholars working in and around social networking. In 2006, Hawisher and Selfe published an article providing commentary and contextualization of the case-studies of their fellow authors Yi-Huey Guo and Lu Liu as they navigate online social spaces in a complex network of languages—including Chinese, English, and Taiwanese. Guo and Liu, as described by Hawisher and Selfe, are two female scholars engaged in a “cyberneopolitan” world defined by “guanxi,” “a complex set of social networks operating through personal connections” (p.

620). These networks, Hawisher and Selfe argue, “operate at…the macro, medial, and micro levels of culture and development—and their effects may be amplified within, and complicated by, the globalized web of computer networks. The connections established through guanxi may allow some individuals… to begin the work of addressing barriers to knowledge and participation and to increase their access to information and communication both within, and across, cultures” (p. 620). Hawisher and Selfe, then, see Lu Liu and Yi-Heuy Guo’s participation in globalized social networking applications as absolutely integral to their literacy practices and development as both scholars and multi-lingual writers—characteristics they do not see as limited to Liu and Guo, but rather indicative of the ways in which literacies are changing through global and social networking. Guanxi, for Selfe, Hawisher, Liu and Guo functions as a signifier for the cyberneopolitan literacy practices in which internet users engage—practices the authors argue that educators should try to understand in order to enrich classroom literacy practices. In 2008, Joseph Moxley was just one researcher whose work built on the earlier scholarship of authors such as Hawisher and Selfe, to highlight how social networking might then be transferred into the classroom in order to foster more complex literacy practices in on and off line learning spaces. Moxley focused on the power structures embedded in certain forms of the emerging online social networking applications—power structures within the programs that are not taxonomically organized—such as wikis, blogs, and media sharing sites. Moxley’s application of social networking to the classroom, and his own writing program administration work, develops the links between parallel structures of power that are represented by social networks—differentiating between “Communities of Power,” and “Communities of Learning” (183). While communities of power are constructed in order to control and monitor the uses of information, Moxley sees social networking on the Internet turning toward communities of learning—where individuals exchange, shape, and complicate information in order to encourage learning and innovation for the entire community. Moxley argues that “our society has moved away from the Information Age to the Age of Peer Production” (p. 184). He links emerging social networking practices in American classrooms to a history within composition and rhetoric of collaboration and peer evaluation, before concluding that the use of social networks within learning spaces—especially those online—provides a more robust framework through which members might participate with the community of learning.

Fast forward two years to Maranto and Barton as representatives of some of the most recent scholarship on social-networking—scholarship that questions how deeply enmeshed composition and rhetoric scholars should become in socially-networked environments. In their popular Computers and Composition March 2010 article,3 Maranto and Barton posit that, “As rhetoricians, we cannot afford to ignore the opportunities for learning, for social and political engagement, that online networking affords” (44). And yet, even as they acknowledge the need for scholars and teachers alike to examine these spaces, they ultimately conclude, “teachers should not try to colonize these spaces, but rather should enact pedagogical practices and theoretical approaches that employ them as a means of teaching students about identity construction and social networking” (38).4 In other words, Maranto and Barton believe teachers should show students how to analyze these spaces, but should be extremely cautious about participating in them in the same ways students do in order to avoid becoming too public with private information that may or may not be supported by the administrative powers at their institutions. Yet Maranto and Barton, Moxley, and Selfe and Hawisher, offer only a small window into the different types of applications, and their differing uses, that social networking has opened up in many Web 2.0 spaces. Of course, these networks will continue to be studied and used both in and outside classrooms—as digital pedagogues look to, as Rich Rice argues, “placeshift ideas to the commonplaces rooted in the lives of students” (“iRhetoric Placeshifting”). This “placeshifting,” the moving of educational spaces to areas where students are most likely to be found and, in turn, choose to experience intellectual and social growth, is currently in full swing and will only continue to increase, because as Rich Rice argues, “Knowledge is meaningless unless personally applied” (“iRhetoric Placeshifting”). While Rich Rice goes on, within “iRhetoric Placeshifting: A New Media Approach to Teaching Classical Rhetoric,” to outline an online, classical rhetoric course, his major premise—that “content must be contextualized” through placeshifting in order for meaning to be made with those introduced to new ideas and concepts—is highly applicable to all teachers, even those in strictly face-to-face classrooms.

3 The popularity of Maranto and Barton’s article can be verified through its recent reach to ScienceDirect’s Top 25 page, showing the widespread impact of the piece. 4 The authors, in my opinion, problematically use the word “colonize” to describe any age bracket outside of high school/early college using applications such as Facebook. 21

By placeshifting to the spaces students are discovering and engaging in, the potential for English as a discipline to also shift, to vibrantly grow and discover new ways of learning, teaching, and making meaning, appears. When asked by College English “What should college English be?” Jeff Rice answered “Networks and new media.” Jeff Rice argues networks are “spaces—literal or figurative—of connectivity. They are ideological as well as technological spaces generated by various forms of new media that allow information, people, places, and other items to establish a variety of relationships that previous spaces or ideologies of space (print being the dominant model) did not allow” (128). The words “space” and “place” figure prominently in Jeff Rice’s definition—networked through technology, these connective areas are defined, (re)imagined, and grow by the relationships established by and with participants. Jeff Rice contends that, “even if the discipline of English studies remains wary of the network and suspicious of its place within the curriculum, the field can still benefit from learning how networks alter both understandings of writing and writing itself,” because “the network is reimagining social and informational relationships so profoundly” (129). As individuals use networks to place information, people, and learning in ever more complicated, ever more connected arenas, educators must look again at the ways writing is used to foster and define information. As Jeff Rice maintains, networks, for good or ill, are “the information spaces of media beings. They are open places of rhetorical production” (133). We, as rhetorical educators, have a responsibility to help imagine, investigate, and build social networks, as connectivity continues to (re)shape writing landscapes. Educators must work the net, if they hope to help students establish patterns of informed rhetorical action with and in socially networked moments of writing. Alexandra Juhasz’s “Learning from Youtube” outlines three points of a call to action for teachers hoping to work in complex ways with Youtube and, expanded, the social web: 1) Media praxis must integrate theory and practice with the local and global. A true femi-digi- praxis should lead and learn from conversations in real communities about the impacts, meanings, and power of the media. This should be done through site-specific and problem-based projects where we create solutions communally. 2) Working collaboratively and stressing and benefiting from the diversity of our approaches, training, experience, and positions leads to the best media praxis. We need to be brave enough to

teach each other, to work past specialization, and to communicate in the variety of languages in which we are comfortable and trained. 3) We must model what we want to create: a media praxis supporting engaged citizens who participate in power sharing, or “creative democracy,” radical pedagogy, ethical process, accountability, and social justice enacted through and about the media. Juhasz’s focus on learning “from conversations in real communities,” “working collaboratively,” and a commitment to modeling “what we want to create,” creates a beginning frame for educators looking to investigate ways in which writing occurs with and in social networks. Her attention to community, collaboration, and diversity highlights how educators may begin to imagine their roles in the highly interactive spaces of such social networking giants as Youtube.com, Twitter.com, and Facebook.com. Social Networking Application Examples Going live in 2005, and with an interface facelift in March 2010 meant to increase site traffic and the amount of time users spend on the site, YouTube.com delivers to users an interface that encourages the upload and distribution of videos up to ten minutes in length (About). YouTube states that the primary purpose of the online video sharing giant is to encourage users to connect to one another. On YouTube’s About page, site visitors find the following description: “YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small.” This focus on human interaction has served YouTube well, as the site is inarguably the social video-sharing king of the Internet. In a general sense, YouTube encourages users to share their own thoughts, skills, and talents—relying on the interestedness and rhetoricality of active, individual uploaders and video commentators/watchers to drive and maintain the site’s popularity. YouTube works through a simple interface. Users create an account that then allows them to upload videos. The longer users work in and with an active account, the more content they’re allowed to upload to the site. Uploaded videos are then tagged (i.e. given searchable reference words) by the users that upload them, before they are made available to other site users and site visitors. Videos that are made available to an outside audience are then watched, rated, commented on, and possibly retagged through additional posting by other users (YouTube

channels may also be set to private, prohibiting anyone who is not specifically invited by the user from watching the content). The more popular and highly-rated user videos become, the more likely those videos will then show up in search engines and be picked up by other popular networks looking to share the most viral5 videos on the web. Sites that collocate viral web offerings, like thedailywh.at, rely on the ratings systems of major social networking sites to determine what content they should then catalogue, embed, and share with their users. For example, a simple Google.com video search of “laughing baby” pulls up a short YouTube video entitled “Hahaha.”6 “Hahaha” is less than two

Figure Two: A sample YouTube.com page minutes of a baby laughing to nonsense noises made by an adult off camera, but it has generated over 166,500,000 hits by YouTube viewers who have in turn forwarded, tagged, and reposted the video, expanding its audience and popularity. High ratings and the embedding and reposting that usually accompanies them, like “Hahaha”s over 332,000 likes, are generated through users who

5 “Viral” is used here to mean a piece of online information, art, or an object which is disseminated through the Internet through various news media and social networking outlets very rapidly due to its popularity—the video, image, or aural offering spreads quickly, like a virus, i.e. viral. 6 “Hahaha” also demonstrates how highly visited nodes are reinforced and introduced to new users as discussed in the previous section of this chapter. 24

believe the videos are entertaining, useful, educational, and/or timely. With websites like Hulu.com picking up web friendly networked and cable television shows for Internet audiences, YouTube’s niche—defined by its users’ desires to connect to one another—is secure.7 YouTube was also instrumental in changing the 2008 United States Presidential Elections. From the start of the elections in 2007, where all major election front runners not only maintained YouTube channels, but crafted videos specifically for YouTube users, to today, when the Obama administration has continued to use YouTube as a major media outlet (the Obama administration is famous for bringing the “fireside chat” into the 21st century), YouTube continues to be a social networking force that gains in popularity. The presidential focus on YouTube has, of course, again tapped into YouTube’s bread-and-butter market, making the president current and connecting him to one of Generation Y’s homepoints. Moving in the opposite direction of YouTube.com’s openly person-based video sharing site is Twitter.com. While a relatively young social-networking application compared to YouTube and Facebook, Twitter is also one of the most controlled social networking sites as far as length of content (allowing tweeters a maximum of 140 characters per post), and one of the most viral web-based applications in Web 2.0 history—doubling its usership from 2009 to 2010, with predictions that by 2012 “nearly one fifth of Web users will be on Twitter” (emarketer). Users on Twitter “tweet” to followers, making use of retweets and hashtags (a keyword system) to organize and popularize information. A self-proclaimed “San Francisco start-up,” Twitter, as a company, positions itself as an “aggressively open” “information network” (About, emphasis mine). Twitter’s marketing focus, then, is not on the individual, but rather the individual’s ability to contribute to a collective information resource. And they maintain this focus, despite the fact that some users privatize their Twitter accounts, just like Youtube users, to control the audience. Unlike YouTube’s desire to “provide a forum for people,” Twitter markets itself as a network of information not predicated on how an individual connects to his or her community, but rather whether or not that person has any relevant “information” to share.

7 This is despite frustration by corporations such as Viacom, who’ve widely criticized YouTube for its participation in violating copyright, through (in Viacom’s opinion) shoddy copyright-infringement policing. 25

Here, Twitter harkens back to the early days of Wikipedia (where contributors in the early 2000’s were sought not for their interests, or daily activities, but for the knowledge they could provide for free to the group) and is different than other social networking sites in that much of the company’s publicity works toward distancing, instead of identifying, themselves from their users, regardless of user repurposing that might highlight the individual. Though unlike Wikipedia, Twitter’s desire for users to compile information seems more focused on the minute-to-minute, day-by-day reporting confined more recently to Internet news sites— much like what an

Figure Three: A sample Twitter.com feed unvarnished CNN newsfeed from several different reporters with totally different backgrounds might afford the public. Yet, this goal seems far off in the Twitterverse despite the best efforts of CEO, and Twitter creator, Evan William. Twitter is almost solely recognized as a social networking site that hones in on individual experience rather than organized media analysis or major news. A recent Pear Analytics Study catalogued less than 4% of tweets on Twitter as news based (with a whopping 40% characterized as “Pointless Babble”). Yet, Twitter CEO Evan William consistently argued at the Web 2.0 Summit in 2009 that Twitter was not a “social network” like that of Facebook. William took

great pains, repeating himself several different ways, several different times within the interview, to argue that Twitter was a site trying to “deliver people to the …best information possible.” The distancing language William uses points to a larger goal of the company. Yet, to realize William’s goal, Twitter is going to have to increase the 4% of news based tweets, and reduce the pointless babble—content characterized as “pointless babble” included many of the minute-by- minute updates provided by users regarding their food choices, thoughts on life, and general daily activities. Increasing the news would seem to be a monumental task that would undercut most of the press Twitter receives from the ridiculous postings of high profile celebrities—most easily exemplified by Kanye West, whose tweets about the difficulty of sleeping on fur pillows, among other things, inspired a Josh Grobin comedy sketch on Saturday Night Live.8 This goal, to increase news and decrease personal accounts by users, is most recently seen in Twitter’s company run “learn by example” media blog. The media blog created by Twitter employees uses a Twitter format to highlight different ways media conglomerates might take advantage of the most efficient and complex ways to appeal to a Twitter market (Mashable). In an interview with Mashable.com, Twitter’s Robin Sloan argued that the blog would explain to companies, such as NBC, CBS, or The New York Times, how to “do better journalism” (Mashable). Again, Twitter’s desire to position itself as an information super-highway, and not a social-networking site, can be seen through an emphasis on better journalism, not the increased numbers of followers. Twitter’s desire to set itself apart from the “pointless babble” making up many tweets could be due to several factors. If Twitter doesn’t work to position itself as an information, and not a people, network, the company may fear they are one celebritweet away from losing their viral status. Or, that celebritweeting is their only status. Or, that the pointless babblers will simply lose steam and stop posting. Twitter may also be working to brand itself as a current, shorthand version of Wikipedia and may fear that focusing on individual contributions works against their desire to gain and maintain credibility. Last, Twitter may ultimately be interested in attracting large networked sponsors and users, and silencing the individual over the corporate through marketing is one way to attract sponsorship and establish legitimacy. Consequently, the “information network” would instead become a “consumer network,” where corporations were provided yet one more avenue to distribute their message to potential buyers and investors. Yet whatever the

8 “Fur pillows are actually hard to sleep on” was even reported by TMZ. 27

reason, Twitter is attempting to depersonalize their social network through distancing language. Clearly, Twitter is an example of a social network where the owners are not solely in control— for good or ill, the original intentions of CEOs and site marketers may never be realized, as the crowd shapes the landscape of this rapidly growing network. Much like “his” Youtube.com channel, Barack Obama also has a Twitter page and over 8 million friends on Facebook, showing just how much influence and consumer attention different social networking sites have managed to garner just in the last few years. This influence, like the population of Generation Y students in higher education, seems to be here to stay, even if there is an evolution in the sites used or the types of technologies supported on social networking applications. Inevitably, as with all technology, more sites will be created to collate and sort information, as with Ning.com.9 Other sites, such as MySpace.com (the precursor to Facebook), will lose popularity, as users of the sites abandon or change homepoints. And, as the networks increase in complexity, active landscape shifting like that now occurring on Twitter.com, and that was possible on Wikipedia during its heydays in the very early 2000’s, may slowly disappear through the solidification of site purposes. Facebook is one social networking site that has seen many mini-evolutions, as the company works toward continuing to develop and maintain a social networking space that lies in an equidistant space between sites such as Twitter and YouTube, with the addition of a member focus on photo albums (somewhat like Flickr.com). Facebook, more so than any other social networking site, relies on the personal experiences of its users in order to drive member participation. Facebook’s own Facebook page says it best: “Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected…Millions of people use Facebook every day to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.” Facebook, unlike Twitter’s repositioning, or YouTube’s middle-of-the-road stance, accomplishes an individually driven mission through a combination of a user’s “wall” and “newsfeed.”

9 An online application that enables users to build their own social networking websites. 28

Every Facebook user builds and maintains a “wall” (pictured below) created explicitly for the user, when he or she signs up for an account on the website’s homepage. When a user makes and accepts friend requests, these friends are added to the user’s wall. The user then receives status updates, party invitations, online gaming directions, and comments on their own updates on the newsfeed—the scrolling homepage of every user (see picture). Many users also make use of the online photo album feature, cataloging and tagging their experiences for other users and friends. These photos then become part of every friend’s newsfeed, disseminating the pictures and updating the uploader’s status to friends in the network. Part of Facebook’s photo album application allows users to tag places, people, and objects inside photographs—these tagged objects are then viewable by others who share the same tags. So, if a user uploads a family photo to Facebook, that photo could include the internal tags of “mom,” “dad,” and “Sparky” to help other users understand the photo’s content. Twitter also allows users to upload pictures (called twitpics), but more users more frequently take advantage of Facebook’s album feature and twitpics, like tweets themselves, are often up for shorter amounts of time and aren’t placed into

Figure Four: A sample Facebook wall

albums. Ultimately, whether the social networking sites highlight the contributions by their individual participants, as with Facebook, or unsuccessfully attempt to bury these contributions under the auspices of “information gathering,” as with Twitter, the main sources of information the companies are able to organize and offer as content are made available through the work done and maintained by each and every one of their users—information named (through tagging), organized (through posts, pages, and tagging), valued (through rating), and updated (through user participation) by the crowd. Yet even though users have been tagging items through social networking for years (decades, really), not until the last two years have major media outlets begun to pay more than cursory attention to the real social influence wielded by these social-networking sites. This attention has only served to exponentially increase participation and the power wielded by social networking. And while it could be argued that high media attention was, and is still, paid to Wikipedia (especially in academic circles, if not in popular ones), almost all major news articles have centered around the validity, or lack thereof, of the information presented on wiki’d and socially networked sites. It’s only now, starting in 2010, that the question of reliability has fallen to the question of believability, or audience trust. Most recently, Time’s 100 Most Influential People changed to reflect the amount of sway a popular cultural figure holds in the network. Time argues that social networking sites have made it “easier to quantify certain kinds of influence.” This quantification is largely furthered by the social-networking companies themselves, in their desire to be seen as strong advertising markets for everything from online-gaming to toothpaste—a new commercial frontier, as it were. Social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, for instance, can provide some basic information about the breadth of a person's brand. The measures are far from perfect: they tend to reward the young rather than the old, artists and entertainers rather than scientists and thinkers. Lady Gaga has nearly as many Twitter followers as Barack Obama does; is she really just as influential? Probably not. …On our index, Sarah Palin's social-networking score is about 45 times that of Nancy Pelosi. Conan O'Brien may have lost the Tonight Show wars, but he emerged with almost 20 times as many Twitter followers as Jay Leno… Pelosi and Leno might hold the more prestigious positions, but there's little doubt about who has more ability to change the course of our conversations at a moment's notice — and in an interconnected world, that's what influence is all about.

(Time) Time’s use of a social networking index in order to categorize the popularity of popular media moguls indicates social-networking sites have become ingrained in popular culture to the extent that channel watchers, followers, and friends now represent status markers—the more you have the more “viral” you are. And although Time argues that the influence of Lady Gaga isn’t as great as that of President Obama, I might ask, “In what circles?” If Lady Gaga is able to reach and influence a greater audience than Obama, even on issues of national, or international, importance, then by what is Time measuring the effect of celebrity? Lady Gaga’s social-networking index is only one example of the many ways entertainers, businesses, and social-commentators are increasingly making use of applications such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook to extend their brands and fan bases. The importance of social networking, the ability of its practitioners to influence and shift popular opinion, will only continue to grow as America and much of the developed world becomes increasingly digitized. Yet, Time’s index points to more than a popularity contest, but a concern that no digital pedagogue worth her salt can ignore—the business of social-networking. Facebook has come under the most fire for the harvesting of user information for marketing purposes. In 2005, Facebook’s privacy policy was surprisingly simple for a web-based company: “No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings” (EFF). In other words, if you didn’t sign up for it, then your information would not be displayed or used. Unfortunately, simplicity quickly went by the wayside as Facebook looked to attract larger media markets. In early 2010, users could inadvertently sign off to a lot more than they bargained for, simply by clicking on anything within the Facebook network.10 With a simple click of the mouse, users gave Facebook and their affiliates the permission to use their name, their friends’ names, pictures, hometown, gender, and the list goes on, for market research (Facebook). As explained by Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As

10 And while Facebook is currently in talks to modify their privacy policies yet again, due to backlash from their current practices, it would be foolish to assume that the corporation plans to pull back entirely from harvesting the private information of their users. Instead, we must vigilantly pursue accumulating as much knowledge as we possibly can regarding the policies that affect classrooms making use of social-network applications. 31

Facebook grew larger…it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it's slowly but surely helped itself—and its advertising and business partners—to more and more of its users’ information, while limiting the users’ options to control their own information.” Only after a monumental public outcry early in 2010, and the cancelling of large numbers of Facebook accounts by users all over the world, has Facebook begun to shift their policies—but they’re not done “fixing” them yet. In a sense, Facebook began to “tag” its users for companies in ways the users influenced but had no real control over. Consequently, when these applications and networks are used in classrooms, it becomes important that teachers not forget what exactly they are signing in, signing up, and logging on to, not only for their own use but for students as well. The Rhetoricality of Tagging At this point, it should be fairly clear that during the last few decades, Internet-based social networking has slowly but surely gained its international cybernetic feet, attracting the attention of digital scholars across disciplines and provoking discussions about both economic and academic usefulness of the organizational structures present in the social web (Golder and Huberman (2005); Gruber (2010); Hawisher and Selfe (2006); Harrison (2002); Jenkins (2006); Mathes (2004); James Porter (2010); Joshua Porter (2005); Selber (2004); Surowiecki (2004); Trupe (2002); Vander Wal (2006)). By 2004, some Internet-based social networking applications had moved toward supporting user-based classification systems—allowing individual users not only to display and organize information, but to “name” it, through tagging (Harrison; Mathes; Selber; Surowiecki; Trupe; Vander Wal; Yancey). While all of the sites discussed earlier in the chapter (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) rest in different niches of the semantic web, all are fueled by individual contributions and ultimately rely on the “tagging” and/or rating all users engage in collaboratively, in order to organize and display data in a cogent manner. Scott Golder and Bernardo Huberman describe collaborative tagging as a practice that “allows anyone—especially consumers—to freely attach keywords or tags to content. Collaborative tagging is most useful when there is no librarian’s role or there is too much content…Tagging is like filtering: out of all the possible documents that are tagged, a filter returns only those items tagged with that tag” (2). The tags users choose then become linked to the primary source of information that in turn can place the information in conversation with other discrete nodes sharing the same key terms or descriptions (Golder and Huberman 1; Gruber 2; Mathes 1). “There are several functions tags provide for bookmarks: Identifying what or who

it is about, what it is, who owns it, refining categories, identifying qualities or characteristics, self-reference, task organizing. Users have a strong bias toward using general tags first” (Golder and Huberman). General tags are exactly what they sound like—tags using general words, such as “beach” or “family.” These tags—moving from the general to the specific as users become increasingly network savvy—organize the content, make the content searchable, and create a pattern of like items that users can search through, use, learn from, and play with on the socially networked site. Something is “tagged” through an identification of key terms or descriptive words that the user or creator believes is related to, or encapsulates, the artifact (Golder and Huberman 1). There are many reasons why users tag pieces of information with particular words and identifiers. Golder and Huberman provide an extensive list of user rationales for tagging certain objects with certain identifiers that they compiled during their study of collaboratively tagged spaces in 2005: “identifying what or who it is about,” “identifying what it is,” “identifying who owns it,” “refining categories,” “identifying qualities or characteristics,” “self-reference,” and “task organizing” (4). Tagging is about identification, naming, making sense of things—this process of naming and identification is also classed as metadata, or information used to create data about data. For example, a general Flickr.com search of “red bee,” yields twenty-one “most relevant” pictures that have been tagged by uploaders with the key words of both “red” and “bee.” Yet, only one picture is of an actual bee, while the other twenty are largely made up of the recent placement of a company logo (Red Bee) on the side of a building. So, the side of a building, with a company logo, is now classified as “red bee” on Flckr—“red bee” is now data about the actual picture (the original data—which in this case is metadata about the actual sign on the actual building). For further understanding, Adam Mathes, within Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata, succinctly explains metadata and the objects most often categorized by it. “Metadata is often characterized as data about data.” Metadata is highly structured information about “documents, books, articles, photographs,” or other items created to “support specific functions” (Mathes 1). And while tagging wasn’t new to Internet communities in 2004, the “emphasis on user added keywords as a fundamental organizational construct” shifted the tagging distribution model from tags made available by website architects for users, to tags created by users for website architects and other users (Mathes 3-4). Unlike

taxonomic theories of organization that posit a single source, or engage experts to determine the classification system or schema, these social networking sites highlighted the wisdom of the crowd and brought it to bear on Internet-based social networking (Peterson 7). Before user-generated tagging began to take over the landscape of socially networked sites, the “highly structured” nature of metadata led to ontologies being “traditionally…created by dedicated professionals” (Mathes 2). And while Mathes believes “author created metadata may help with the scalability programs in comparison to professional metadata,” he argues that both approaches share the basic problem with “the intended and unintended eventual users of the information” being “disconnected from the process” of data categorization (2). In other words, Mathes argues that those organizing the information do not overlap perfectly with those needing to use the information—there is always an interpretive gap. This problem leads Mathes to conclude that user based classification schemas (what he terms “folksonomy systems”) although flawed in certain ways, are the best way to classify the large amounts of information on the Internet. On a purely practical level, the amount of information on the web is not cataloguer friendly. Attempting to adhere to “traditional” ontologies (such as taxonomy), instead of refining and developing user-maintained systems ignores the needs and desires of the online publics. User- generated materials and organization must be utilized if the most diverse amount of information is going to be available for the most diverse and largest number of people. This view is in line with that of Mathes, who argues, “Metadata collocates data…helping users find relevant information” (1). Mathes explains that the creation of metadata has generally been approached in two ways: professional creation and author creation, but both of these methods present problems—scalability (i.e. the improbability of using one system on the diverse and complex landscape of data present on the Internet) and its impracticality for the vast amounts of content being produced and used in web spaces (2). Unlike the issues with professional creation and author creation, one of the major “problems” with user-based classification, as outlined by Mathes, is that the personalized nature of user tags leads to minor destabilization of the organizational system—harkening back to the use of “general” tags that Bernardo and Huberman point out. “The tags of “cute” and “me” reflect the dual nature of folksonomic systems: “the compulsion to share and conversely the importance of individuality and ego for the systems to work. Categorization is generally less rigorous and

boundaries are less clear” (Mathes 4). Because the systems are “based more on a synthesis of similarity than a systematic arrangement of materials” ambiguity often becomes imbedded (Mathes 4). These ambiguities, in Mathes opinion, lead to a “major limitation” of user-based classification—“too specific or not specific enough tagging” (Mathes 5). As with Mathes “cute” and “me” examples, unless there is explicit direction from the community on what something “cute” looks like, users are likely to apply this highly subjective label to just about any form of content; the tag of “me” is next to useless if one user expands the boundaries of their search past one other user’s content. Ambiguity problems aren’t easily resolvable in a system solely controlled by users, because controlling the tags that are first applied and then used in a “relatively free system” is “almost impossible” (Mathes 6). Yet, these “problems” can also be strengths, as the words of the actual users of the systems can then shape the landscape with which they are interacting. This landscape of tagging leads to pathways for new and old users alike, as they travel through sites such as YouTube, De.licio.us, or Flickr and become complicated through collaborative filtering sites, like Digg and Reddit. Mathes desrcribes these footpaths as “desire lines,” a term he borrows from Peter Merholz. Tagging “desire lines” are defined by Mathes through Merholz as “the foot worn paths that sometimes appear in a landscape over time” (7). Mathes uses Merholz’s ethnoclassification system to describe the emergence of a controlled vocabulary through user creation of a preliminary classification system (7). This controlled vocabulary, developed by users, “truly speaks the users’ language” (Mathes 7). Instead of relying on expert opinion to determine the paths users must take to organize and navigate through web spaces, user tags can help elucidate the desire lines of a community. Since the language of users “may simply be too different from the other parties to adequately pave the paths in advance, [o]r users’ terms may move too quickly or be fundamentally different than authors or system designers,” relying on expert opinion may actually distance users (Mathes 8). This distancing can be seen occurring through the language differences in official Twitter postings and actual users of Twitter’s services: remember, Twitter’s CEO would have it that the application is an “information network,” while tweets garnering some of the highest attention are regarding superfluous celebrity chatter (i.e. fur pillows). User-controlled tagging on the social Web continues to be emphasized by many sites

relying on user-connectivity, as companies count on user desire-lines to emerge, stabilize and define the available modes of communication accessible on socially-networked sites. In line with the conclusions reached in Gruber’s argument regarding ontology and semantics, Mathes sees metadata created and maintained by users as an Internet inevitability. Yet, he also believes “the movement towards creator described documents has problems as well: often due to inadequate or inaccurate description, or outright deception” (1). The problems Mathes describes can be seen on almost all folksonomic sites. For example, on YouTube, when a new music video is expected for release on the web, trolls frequently post faux descriptions of their own videos in order to generate a greater number of “hits” and increase traffic (and funds) into their own pockets at the expense of fast-clicking, or uninformed, users. Mathes also describes the use of abstract signifiers (such as “hate” and “paradise”) as problematic signifiers in folksonomic spaces—as these terms are too hyper-specific for most crowd space participants. The use of “abstract signifiers” can then limit the affect and effect of an individual contribution to a folksonomic space, as most of the community, if not intimately tied to an understanding of the creator(s)’ use of terms such as “pretty” and “ugly,” will not be able to search and find information tagged with such abstraction. For example, Del.icio.us and Flickr are often cited by scholars investigating user-generated tagging. Del.icio.us, as one of the first sites to encourage user tagging, allows members to name, organize, and search for information found on the web with or without bookmarks (Golder and Huberman 3). Popular bookmarks (places where sites and applications with the same tags are stored by users) can then be searched for or shared among users, creating user-supported social networks that facilitate information distribution (Golder and Huberman 4-5). Flickr pushes further into social networking territory by allowing members to upload and organize photographs through individualized naming, conduct keyword searches in order to find pictures taken, uploaded, and named by other users, and create groups that pursue the compilation of popular, member photographs (Golder and Huberman 1; Mathes 4; Gruber 2; James Porter 1; Joshua Porter 2). Of course, the go-to site for the heights of crowd achievement is Wikipedia.org. Launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia is “the largest and the most popular general reference work on the Internet” (“Wikipedia”). Almost all articles on Wikipedia, over 3 million on the English Wikipedia site alone, are open to edits from new and old contributors alike.

Entries get “wiser” the more users add articles, delete bogus entries, complicate existing entries, hyperlink articles together, and cite further and more recent research. And while the Wikimedia Foundation, the company that maintains Wikipedia, has taken a lot of media flack for the highly publicized faux-biography of John Seigenthaler in 2005, his case seems to be anomalous, and there has been little fuss about the reliability of Wikipedia outside academia since (“Wikipedia”). The differences among Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Wikipedia are that while Del.icio.us allows users to name and organize content found on the web, Flickr encourages users to add their own media, and Wikipedia encourages users to not only add their own content but to evaluate, rewrite, and outright delete the content added by other users—this progression exponentially increases the amount of control users have over not only tagging possibilities, but content possibilities as well (Mathes).11 In other words, Del.icio.us is based on the warrant that most users do not create their own Internet-based content but can organize web content for themselves and others, while Flickr operates under the warrant that most users not only have their own content but wish to share it and know how best to distribute it, and Wikipedia operates under the warrant that some users might actually know the content better than other users who choose to share it and that knowledge is best composed and organized by large, disparate groups. Wikipedia, more so than Flickr or Del.icio.us, is taking advantage of the benefits of a wise crowd. Social Networking and Wise Crowds Recently, Internet and business analysts have begun to study how social networking users build and maintain systems of information that do not rely on taxonomic structures. They ask how users are able to maintain stable information structures through their own tagging and uploading efforts without the need for experts. The study of social networks and the turn toward user created and/or maintained organization posit that individuals who may or may not know one another, share the same goals or ideas, have any particular leadership training, or even understand much beyond the basic precepts of the available information, can still make decisions that may mutually benefit the entire group more efficiently than an expert (Surowiecki 23-31, 107). James Surowiecki rejuvenated the discussion of crowd wisdom on the pop-cultural market through his text The Wisdom of Crowds, in 2004. Since then, crowd wisdom continues to gain

11 For an example of how Flickr has been shaped by its users, see Henry Jenkins description of “fliction” in Convergence Culture Where Old and New Media Collide. 37

press and academic ground as everyone from Netflix to MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence seeks to understand what makes a crowd wise (New York Times; CCI). Of course, healthy social networks, defined by James Surowiecki as “wise crowds”—those that can quickly solve complex problems, generate new materials for, and make decisions that benefit the whole—generally don’t happen by accident (although they can). Wise crowds must be shaped; individuals must be chosen in “open innovation” models (another term for wise crowds) so that the task is, “carefully designed” and “the incentives are tailored to attract the most effective collaborators” (Lohr). In other words, a random group of people can provide highly accurate answers to fairly simple and unsophisticated problems (for instance, how many beans are in a jar), but for more complex problems (the most efficient way to build a car) the working environments and those asked to solve the problem must be carefully chosen by individuals intimate to the issue to be solved in order to provide for the maximum amount of knowledge in the most mutually beneficial situation. To illustrate the reach of a wise crowd, Surowiecki outlines the truly extraordinary example of scientists around the world who made a concerted effort to tackle the SARS virus together (2003). In order to “uncover the source of SARS,” The World Health Organization worked as the collaboration hub for an effort that involved research laboratories from around the globe (159). In little more than a month, the labs were able to announce the coronavirus was responsible for the SARS outbreak—truly a feat of the wise crowd. Separately these labs could have worked for years, but with some solid parallel collaboration (where the members of the individual labs were left to determine the nature, speed, and processes of their own work, but agreed to share all relevant information every day with every other lab), they were able to come to a solution much more rapidly than they ever could have alone. So, how does a wise crowd form? There are four ways humans must be organized so that wisdom can take shape: “diversity of opinion (each person should have some private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts), independence (people’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them), decentralization (people are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge), and aggregation (some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision)” (Surowiecki 10). As with the example of the SARS labs, the distance and differences in the labs from across the world provided the diversity of opinion, the independence each group needed to pursue different

avenues, and the decentralization integral to wise crowd operation. The WHO then provided the means by which the data could be aggregated—in the daily information gathering and sharing sessions. Without the balance provided by all four elements, creating and maintaining a wise crowd environment can become very difficult, if not almost impossible. Diversity of opinion, independence, and decentralization are needed within the group because humans naturally move toward resolution and control, often to their detriment. For example, many Americans like to solve problems quickly and tend to place too much faith in “expert” opinions in order to reach rapid resolutions (Surowiecki). Groups also have a habit of moving toward information cascades (Surowiecki). If members of the group think something is true, and other members then believe this truth without completing the necessary steps to confirm the validity of the belief, an information cascade develops—think of the domino effect in decision-making. Or, Groupthink can emerge, where the group’s needed impetus toward dissent to generate better answers for the problem is still possible but improbable, as group mates come to trust the opinions of others over their own misgivings (Surowiecki). Of course, Surowiecki claims technology, especially Internet-based social networking technologies make the first three qualities (diversity of opinion, independence, and decentralization) that much more easily achieved (277). Almost all social networks rely on some form of Surowiecki’s four principles (diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and aggregation) in order to maintain growth and to keep users coming back for more information. Of course, information cascades can develop—as users vote up videos because they have been voted up by a high majority of watchers before them, add popular tags to pictures because they’ve seen the tags used elsewhere and want the same types of views, or join and participate in the same groups because their “friends” have joined before them. Yet, the sheer amount of users, materials, ever increasing network availabilities, and the ability of the interface to generate the illusion of independence (users have their own YouTube channels, Facebook walls, etc) has the ability to reinforce Suroweicki’s found conditions for wise crowds. The Rise of Folksonomy as a Theory of Practice For help in naming the user-based classification process supported by social networking applications like Flickr and Del.icio.us that were taking advantage of the wise crowd, Gene Smith, a consultant for companies interested in user experiences, on July 23, 2004, asked fellow

members of the Asylomar Institute for Information Architecture listserv (Smith; Vander Wal). Smith was first answered by Eric Scheid, an information architect and event organizer, who offered up “folk classification” (Scheid; Vander Wal). Thomas Vander Wal then responded with, “So the user-created bottom-up categorical structure development with an emergent thesaurus would become a Folksonomy?” and folksonomy quickly became the contested term (Vander Wal).12 Even from the beginning, folksonomy as a classification of a certain type of group structure was formed by a wise crowd. In the years following that 2004 listserv discussion, folksonomy has been rapidly adopted by many digital theorists in the academic community to refer to any and all web-based applications that allow users any organizational or creative license of any and all displayed and created materials—including sites like Flickr and Del.icio.us, as well as different wiki spaces (Mathes; Golder and Huberman; Gruber; Vander Wal; James Porter; Joshua Porter; Peterson).13 Folksonomy as a term has been contested from the start, as the group-based efforts to define what was happening on sites like Delicious and Flickr has evolved right along with differing site capabilities. Originally, Vanderwal intended “folksonomy” to refer only to user-based tagging (Vanderwal folksonomy): “Folksonomy is the result of personal free tagging of information and objects (anything with a URL) for one's own retrieval. The tagging is done in a social environment (usually shared and open to others)” (Vanderwal). The two components to folksonomy that Vanderwal outlines up front are “personal free tagging” and “social environment.” Tagging completed in isolation is not folksonomic, nor is tagging controlled by the few (for example, site moderators) or an application’s architect(s). Yet another interesting twist on his application is his belief that “[f]olksonomy is created from the act of tagging by the person consuming the information.” So although folksonomy must occur in a social environment, the personal aspect of tagging is highlighted here through the addition of the angle of the information “consumer.” It’s interesting to note that Vanderwal does not provide space for information creators to also be participants in folksonomic spaces beyond the sharing of their

12 Vander Wal eventually created an Internet site in order to establish a stable definition for which he still argues. He describes folksonomy as no more or less than: “1) tag; 2) object being tagged; and 3) identity [of the tagged object].” 13 Because as Del.icio.us was allowing the crowd to tag and Flickr was experimenting with crowd based control, Wikipedia was quickly coming to represent the heights of crowd achievement in the digital world. 40

own materials—creators are not namers, not taggers, in Vanderwal’s original definition. Only through consumption can creators become part of the folksonomic process. The original definition of folksonomy allows only the consumer of the object/idea/space to provide the definition. In a sense, this classification requires a relationship between creator and audience that is largely rhetorical. Yet, it is not a dialogic relationship, because there isn’t an opportunity for the creator, the rhetor, to speak back to the audience and, in effect, “change” the definition—the only opportunity for change would come from other consumers through the process of re-tagging. However, Vanderwal’s definition for folksonomy, as it moved out into the world, would not remain stable, or simple, for long. The flux surrounding Vanderwal’s term can be seen in Scott Golder and Bernardo Huberman’s (2005) work, where they consciously decide to avoid using the term “folksonomy” within their article regarding collaborative tagging. After providing a definition of “collaborative tagging”—“collaborative tagging is the practice of allowing anyone – especially consumers – to freely attach keywords or tags to content”—the authors take time to note, “In some sites, collaborative tagging is also known as ‘folksonomy,’ short for ‘folk taxonomy’; however, there is some debate whether this term is accurate, and so we avoid using it here” (1). Through this one sentence, the authors make several rhetorical choices, specifically invoking three different tropes, perhaps inadvertently. Through their use of rhetorical figures and tropes, Golder and Huberman change the face of folksonomy. First, they guarantee that their audience will interchangeably think of folksonomy and collaborative tagging, as they use paralepsis. Consequently, their desire to separate their own work from that of the problematic folksonomy is almost rendered moot under the invoked trope. Second, the authors actually subtly change the definition, as they link the two terms together—folksonomy and collaborative tagging—and add in that anyone can modify the available information (presumably, including the original owner/creator). The addition of anyone to the tagging process expands the available means, creating the opportunity for dialogic interaction on the sites. Creators as well as consumers are now taggers. Third, the authors actually mislabel folksonomy by defining it as “short for ‘folk taxonomy’.” Unlike the authors’ assertion, Vanderwal coined the term to purposefully remove the tax prefix (“folksonomy”). Vanderwal argues that his word creation was very much a conscious effort and was meant as a stand-alone term.

I am a fan of the word folk when talking about regular people. Eric put my mind in the framework with one of my favorite terms. I was also thinking that if you took ‘tax’ (the work portion) of taxonomy and replaced it with something anybody could do you would get a folksonomy. I knew the etymology of this word was pulling is two parts from different core sources (Germanic and Greek), but that seemed fitting looking at the early Flickr and del.icio.us. (Vanderwal, folksonomy) Consequently, the abbreviation that Golder and Huberman refer to does not exist. Not only do Golder and Huberman use Vanderwal’s term to cement their own scholarship’s place in the discussion of folksonomy, they change the definition twice, once through their own definition of “collaborative tagging” and again when they “explain” what folksonomy is. Just the small shifts from Vanderwal’s original definition and the one created and reinforced by Golder and Huberman are important for two reasons: (1) The above example dispels the notion that a word ever has a stable definition (even when used solely by experts); (2) and with the instability of language and words, whatever system of organization is used to file information, there will always be gaps and fissures in retrieval measures due to the complexity of meaning. Golder and Huberman reinforce the issues highlighted by the instability of language systems, as they go on in their article to underline problems in the structures of sites enabling folksonomy/collaborative tagging; they also make clear that these problems are not isolated to folksonomic spaces. The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems argues that folksonomy, just like taxonomy, suffers from the same meaning-making issues organizational structures have always suffered from: polysemy, synonymy, and basic level variation (Golder and Huberman 1). Golder and Huberman define the first of the above three issues, polysemy, as the dilution of the user’s query by “returning related but potentially inapplicable items” (1). For example, if a user searches a site by the word “bank,” the results yielded by such a search could include a riverbank, a cloudbank, a banking plane, a financial bank, and the list goes on. Yet, this type of polysemy can also be prized by searchers interested in the interrelatedness of such terms, or the metaphorical relations some users might imply by, say, tagging an image of a heart with the word “bank.” Of course, tagging controlled by the site architect, or tagging limited to a taxonomic definitional structure (the same type you’d find in most encyclopedias and that Mathes describes in professional tagging), wouldn’t encourage users to make these metaphorical

connections, and would police most entries that did not fall in the line with accepted forms of traditional14 meanings of “bank.” Unlike polysemy, Golder and Huberman see the second issue, or synonymy, as occurring when “multiple words have the same or related meanings” (1-2). Case in point, think of all of the word variations a person might find in a word like “anger,” if they were to look in a comprehensive thesaurus. Almost the opposite problem of polysemy, synonymy, according to Huberman and Golder, “presents a greater problem for tagging systems because inconsistency among the terms used can make it difficult to determine if all needed results are returned.” One user may search for “anger,” one may look under “furious,” and a third yet could choose “rage”; all terms aren’t likely to be tagged onto each piece of data that may relate to various levels of displeasure. Yet, like polysemy, synonymy creates redundancies in all systems of organization that information architects might implement to control site vocabulary. In fact, users looking to increase the views on a piece of data they find particularly interesting or informative are likely to consciously employ multiple synonyms to tag their content in order to correct the errors of omission, whereas a machine, no matter how complex, has no such individualized impetus, nor the facility to understand complicated, individualized metaphorical or definitional issues. Consequently, the polysemy and synonymy likely to occur in a folksonomic system may be more purposeful, may illustrate greater rhetoricality and facility of language, than that arranged by an organizational expert, because it will reflect the desire lines of the group—not the thought processes of a singular entity or program. Seeking to account for some of the more subtle “errors” in organization systems, Golder and Huberman assert that, “The basic level problem is that related terms that describe an item vary along a continuum of specificity ranging from very general to very specific” (2). As an example, think of a picture of a jacket. Now, think of describing this jacket. Do you list the color? Length? Material? How many “tags” would be sufficient to describe the jacket in your mind? “Basic levels vary in specificity to the degree that such specificity makes a difference in the lives of the individual. Like variation in expertise, variations in other social or cultural categories likely yield variations in basic levels” (Golder and Huberman 2). Clearly, your experiences with jackets also

14 Needless to say, one might wonder whose “traditional meaning” wins out in a taxonomically structured information system. 43

shape the words and object affordances with which you imagine tagging your object. Consequently, much like synonymy and polysemy, no matter whom or what is doing the tagging, cultural and social experiences shape how information systems are created and maintained. The most interesting find from Golder and Huberman, and the one most relevant to pedagogical discussions, is that their research suggests that relatively stable information patterns will always emerge, no matter who is in charge of the tagging. Through their evaluation of two separate Del.icio.us data sets, they found that the combined tags of many users’ bookmarks gave rise to a stable pattern in which the proportions of each tag were nearly fixed (Golder and Huberman 6). They noted that a holistic community driven definition emerged and then stabilized over time for almost every tag. As new tags were introduced to Del.icio.us, users contributed different types of information to the tag until it was a largely stable label for a certain type of information. Therefore, new additions to the site are more likely to be tagged through an understanding of this stable definition. For example, the tag of “copyright” is stabilized through bookmarks regarding plagiarism, creative commons, U.S. copyright office, and teaching academic responsibility. As more bookmarks are added with the tag of “copyright” it is more likely that these bookmarks will fall in line with the stable thread already established by previous users. Think again to the image of a social network. The higher tracked nodes are those most likely to establish the stable patterns that others follow. And if the word were picked up and used in a socially-significant way (meaning, other users would agree with, and use, the new defining characteristics) by a new user, the process of stabilization would begin again—a new stable pattern would emerge, a “nascent consensus allowing minority patterns to coexist alongside popular ones without disruption” (Golder and Huberman 6-7). Again think back to the image of a social network and consider the smaller nodes along the edges of the network that have built and maintained their own community, complete with a vocabulary. In effect, the crowd, without concerted, systematized effort, gravitates toward “sensemaking,” toward relational categorizing of data (Golder and Huberman 3). The co-existence of minority with majority patterns also makes room for the co-existence of many alternate interpretations—allowing difference room to grow. Golder and Huberman’s data contradicts the detractors of folksonomy, those that would argue wise crowd theory is one step up from anarchy.

Elaine Peterson, a Resources Specialist at Montana State University, argues that folksonomy is inherently and irreparably flawed. She states, “a traditional classification scheme will consistently provide better results to information seekers” (6). In Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy, Peterson traces taxonomic classifications of data back to Aristotle’s Categories. “Taxonomy arose as an attempt to organize information about plants and animals in the physical world and Aristotle is often considered the father of classification or taxonomy. Through the development of categories, one is trying to answer the question, ‘What is it?’” (Peterson 1). For Peterson, trying to answer the “what is it” question posed by Aristotle requires an understanding that “accurate classification” is the key issue in Aristotle’s Categories (1). Peterson argues accuracy is learned through training and professionalization. She does not believe folksonomy can create a complex, yet, usable system of organization. She states that only catalogers, by “keeping in mind contraries, particulars, and categories,” can correctly apply “basic Aristotelian principles” (1). There are three major problems with the warrants undergirding the foundations of Peterson’s argument. Most importantly, by invoking Aristotle, her argument is aligned with origin theorists who would base the classification systems of information developed by United States citizens in the twenty-first century in ancient Greece (warrant number one). This relationship then places the goals of information architects (warrant number two) in line with Ancient Greece. And if Peterson’s argument rests on an intimate knowledge of Aristotle (warrant number three), as all rhetors that study ancient Grecian rhetorics know, systems of Aristotle’s are rarely, if ever, basic, accurate systems of identification—they are highly theoretical and intimately connected to Aristotle’s understanding of metaphysics. And, if one were to go further, one could argue that Aristotle’s Rhetoric has a social understanding of invention not incompatible with folksonomy. In line with the above warrants, Peterson continues to position her argument through Aristotelian rhetorics, by employing direct quotations of Aristotle to argue in favor of a strict classification system controlled by a cataloguer. “Perhaps the most important philosophical underpinning of traditional classification is the phrase, ‘A is not B.’ Even if a cataloger did not hold an underlying metaphysical stance that there is a particular way things are, the necessity of classifying and grouping physical objects has placed catalogers into that framework.” The “particular way things are” Peterson uses here may refer to Aristotle’s own Metaphysics, or it may be an existential argument pertaining to the beliefs of humans that exist beyond physical

interpretation. Either way, the system is predicated on “expert” or “elite” opinions being more accurate in the “particular way things are.” And while I do not wish to address all of the complexities in Aristotle’s “A is not B” argument, certainly a post-modern interpretation of a system based on one individual’s ideas is flawed—in the sense that it accounts for only what the creator perceives. However, the concerns Peterson shares regarding folksonomy are not unusual and represent, in my opinion, a good cross-section of the ways in which many academics respond to most crowd-sourcing—like Wikipedia—in general. Yet, Peterson, even as an expert opposed to folksonomy, participates in the crowd (even if inadvertently). When Peterson uses Wikipedia to define folksonomy, she turns her argument to take on more than tagging, and in effect creates and contributes to her own folksonomic community. She states, “It seems appropriate to define ‘folksonomy’ using Wikipedia, since Wikipedia itself is a good example of a social network of individuals contributing to a work. Wikipedia allows any person on the Internet to contribute to articles to it without judgment from others” (3). She then parenthetically references the review Tony Hammonds et al. completed on “social bookmarking” and its accompanying Internet sites in 2005, but there are three interesting turns made through Peterson’s definition. First, the original definition of folksonomy was not based on community sites like Wikipedia—Peterson could have more closely followed the original definition by returning to De.licio.us, completing a keyword search on folksonomy, and then using the websites found to build an encompassing definition. Then, citing inconsistencies and irrelevant tags present within the folksonomic site would have furthered her argument. Instead, by using Wikipedia, like Golder and Huberman’s invocation of the term “folksonomy” before their turn toward “collaborative tagging,” Peterson extends the definition of folksonomy passed tagging to include the creation of whole information sets—in Wikipedia’s case, a comprehensive encyclopedic database generated by millions of users in dozens of languages. And again, the definition of folksonomy undergoes a folksonomic change, as another member of the information community adds their own understanding of the availabilities of user-based Internet sites. Second, when Peterson claims that “Wikipedia allows any person on the Internet to contribute to articles to it without judgment from others,” she shows she may need to investigate her topic further (3). Wikipedia is one of the most openly contested encyclopedias on the planet. Outside media attention often focuses on the reliability of the site, and the primary way users

participate in a wiki’d community is through additions and deletions of their fellow posters. Unlike, say, the Oxford English Dictionary, where users trust expert encyclopedic compilers to provide accurate information (as the text carries with it the ethos of a published work) and there are no ways for the community of users to provide sustainable, immediate feedback, Wikipedia is constantly re-examined for validity and is often updated for the sake of clarity and cutting edge research. In these ways, established articles in Wikipedia could be said to be more accurate, more thoroughly vetted than their paper-published counterparts, with greater emphasis on the open contestations of informational peers, than any non-socially organized encyclopedic space. Third, Peterson does not reference any of the primary participants, nor the(ir) web spaces, involved in the creation of the term “folksonomy” (i.e. Vander Wal’s stable blog post that highlights the key players in the term’s creation). If Peterson wants to argue that socially networked ways of meaning-making are not as reliable as “traditional” forms, it would seem using socially-networked sites to define anything would contradict the article’s claims. Using the definition from Wikipedia only serves to prove the opposite case to which she argues. If the wiki’d definition is accurate enough that it is one of the only specifically folksonomic references in Peterson’s piece, then it would seem to connote that socially-networked spaces are as reliable as secondary research from “more credible” sources. Ultimately, Peterson’s extension of the definition of folksonomy, in conjunction with her argument regarding validity, and her use of networked sourcing point to the very complex ways wise-crowds are viewed by different information stakeholders. There is yet another camp of scholars that believe those arguing for or against folksonomy engage in a useless debate. Thomas Gruber, author of The Ontology of Folksonomy: A Mash-up of Apples and Oranges, believes scholars gnashing their teeth in protest of folksonomy due so in semantic error. Gruber argues that folksonomy, much like taxonomy, is an example of an available ontology “enabling technology for the Semantic Web” (“Ontology of Folksonomy”). In connection with the more well-known definition of ontology as the study of being in existence, Gruber defines ontology as a “means for people to state what they mean by the terms used in data that they might generate, share, or consume” (“Ontology of Folksonomy”). Meaning, any system used to generate, share, or consume data is an ontology—the names for these systems

(such as folksonomy) simply help define the ontology under which they function.15 Gruber believes folksonomies, like any ontology, are only as useful as they are full of use. He argues, “Folksonomies are an emergent phenomenon of the Social Web. They arise from data about how people associate terms with content that they generate, share, or consume” (“Ontology of Folksonomy”). Here Gruber ties the growth of the social web to the emergence of folksonomy, pairing the classification system with the emergence of sites that allow for more user-generated and maintained data. Arguing about the applicability of the definitions and organizations on these sites, in Gruber’s opinion, misses the point. Gruber suggests that information architects should not direct their attentions toward the validity of what he labels as current “ontologies,” but their uses. “Recently the two ideas have been put in opposition, as if they were right and left poles of a political spectrum. This is a false dichotomy. As the Semantic Web matures and the Social Web grows, there is increasing value in applying Semantic Web technologies to the data of the Social Web” (“Ontology of Folksonomy”).16 Here, Gruber unites folksonomy and taxonomy underneath the umbrella of ontology to redirect attention to how users, both professionals and laypeople that choose to organize data, might layer systems of information in different and community-specific ways. As the systems we live and work with change, so too must the ways we organize data found and made in these systems—to do otherwise ignores the change happening around us, making work more and less relevant depending on its applicability and usefulness. Gruber argues that users of any space systematize their interactions and “ontologies are specifications of the conceptualizations at a semantic level” (“Ontology of Folksonomy”). Folksonomies, like taxonomies, simply enable users to conceptualize organization in new and different ways: “Ontology is an enabling technology—a layer of the enabling infrastructure—for information sharing and manipulation” (“Ontology of Folksonomy”). The issue is not, as Peterson would have it, about the “correctness” of the system or, as Mathes argues, that

15 Notice here that Thomas Gruber also uses the expanded definition of folksonomy to account for created information, yet he also pulls from Vander Wal with his emphases on naming and organization. 16 The “semantic web” is defined within the December 2007 edition of The Scientific American as “an enhancement that gives the Web far greater utility. It comes to life when people immersed in a certain field or vocation … agree on common schemes for representing information they care about… Semantic Web tools allow [users] to link their schemes and translate their terms, gradually expanding the number of people and communities [that] can understand one another automatically” (Feigenbaum, Herman, Hongsermeier, Neumann and Stephens). The “social web,” then, becomes a consequence of the available semantics.

folksonomy is closer to user desire lines, but rather what the system reveals about the users— what connections the structures then enable different consumers and creators to make with one another. Ultimately, naming and ordering choices made by any given community highlight the ways in which information is considered useful by different people groups. These methods of organization, folksonomy included, may provide additional insight for researchers looking to make connections among different data sets or to participants looking to create new materials the community might use. Wise crowds using self-determined methods of organization can encourage production and consumption patterns that move across applications and platforms. Henry Jenkins applies wise crowd theory to his discussion of cultural media in his 2006 text Convergence Culture. Convergence he defines as “the flow of content across multiple media platforms and industries,” as he describes the “technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes mapping the migratory behavior of media audiences who will search for ideal entertainment experiences” (Jenkins 2). In other words, the multitude of intersections across and within cultures that always occur through mediation (whether technological, visual, aural, oral, and so on), are also intimately connected with economics. He argues that in convergence culture “grassroots and corporate media intersect, interacting in unpredictable ways” (2). This unpredictability generates new materials, both for consumer/creators and the industrial complex, and consumption becomes a “collective process” maintained, adjusted, and reinforced through “collective intelligence” (Jenkins). Of course, whether the method of organization is pre-determined or developed by participants would then shape the potential landscape that would in turn be harvested by media developers. As the semantic and social aspects of the Internet continue to grow—shaping the sites that Internet users engage with, see, hear, and contribute to—it would be best to study the affordances and limits of folksonomic systems as they continue to extend their on and off line borders. As information expands, different systems of organization, especially those that harness the crowd, will be in greater demand, because there is no foreseeable way, even if users preferred professional information architects to organize and display all user-contributed content on the Internet, for individuals working in isolation to provide the necessary systems. Information on and offline is developing at too rapid a rate through the influx and convergence of cultural media.

Folksonomy and Economics Of course, another way to explore folksonomy would be through the capitalistic opportunities presented for companies due to convergence. As folksonomically constructed sites reveal the ontological associations made by users, companies harvest user-created (i.e. free) data in order to build their own (i.e. pay-to-play) programs and systems. Companies also use the contributions of information creators and sharers to shape new advertisements and additional experiences (through games, available applications, and social interfaces); these additional experiences are then presented to these same users in future use-sessions. As these applications are used, they then make their way through the crowd, virally influencing many of the connected nodes in the network. Consider Facebook’s famous Farmville mini-game. Farmville is played by Facebook users who use their connections to other users in order to advance in the game. Successful game playing is then commented on, “liked,” image captured, and even Youtubed. Farmville’s viral success then spawned Restaurant City and Hotel City (among many others)— mini-games available for users where bonuses are awarded to participants who get other participants to not only join up but “work” in and visit (not to mention the real-life monies spent by users looking to upgrade their gaming experiences) their restaurants, hotels, and farms. These applications of folksonomy, mining crowd interests to create products and services, can be linked to “long-tail” economics and “adhocracy.” The long-tail theory of economics argues that it is possible for businesses to flourish by selling products to niche markets (Porter 1). A folksonomically defined market creates niches that can then be exploited by capitalist enterprises. In other words, folksonomy creates long tails that companies use to develop materials for smaller markets they reach technologically. For example, Ravelry.com is a free and open online community network for knitters and crocheters. Along with free patterns, pictures of projects, and chat forums that are tagged, rated, and organized by users, the space also provides links, rates, and tags to small and large companies that deal in yarn, needles, hooks, and patterns. These knit and crochet specific nodes then fan out to encompass many other products and services, including narrative blogging, home improvement, cooking, and many other products and services mostly maintained by individuals or home run companies. Individually, the services offered by the many different knitters, crocheters, and the companies they work for and with, are a patchwork of tails that together make up a vibrant, living, knowledge community. The individuals, small companies, and

corporations offering goods and services to the knowledge communities spawned by sites such as Ravelry.com rely on the relationship maintaining multiple forms of communication. In order to maintain several levels of conversation among consumers, creators, and producers, knowledge communities make connections to one another in order to build new knowledge and update the old. Henry Jenkins argues that folksonomic knowledge communities, as they “form around mutual intellectual interests” can then interact with the “long tail”—“as their members work to forge new knowledge often in realms where no ‘expertise’ exists” (20). As the crowd creates knowledge the community wants and/or needs, niche markets can then develop additional resources or goods that the community may choose to purchase and consume. These moments of creation and consumption, then, fuel smaller markets that are continually evolving: “Because of the low cost of selling and distributing digital information, it is possible to sell products to niche markets” (Porter 6). New knowledge is often also created in conjunction with niche markets, as users and developers make use of the system. Consequently, “pursuit and assessment of knowledge is at once communal and adversarial”—an “adhocracy” that continuously interacts with the “long tail” of the niche market (Jenkins 20). To return to the example of Ravelry, one knitter may post a homemade pattern for a particular type of sweater. As the sweater gained in popularity, a crocheter might comment that she wishes to crochet the piece. This request might then spur the creator to link to another post with the necessary conversions, or another contributor to Ravelry more versed in crochet may decide to take up the challenge. Either way, the relationship is reciprocal—a niche marketer selling goods on Ravelry must be in constant communication with the local marketees, working together to create a continually evolving complex map of goods and services. Of course, limiting concerns to whether or not marketers and marketees are working together without exploitation does not account for the reality or complexity of many of these knowledge communities. A study of the long-tail reveals an adhocracy that runs, at times, antithetically to many of the goals of a writing teacher looking to pursue folksonomy in a democratic writing classroom. Studying the rhetoric of the long-tail, in the end, can only yield a portion of the reasons for why and how individuals participate in these spaces. Jim Porter shifts Deirdre McClosky’s argument regarding the rhetoric of economics to instead focus on the economics of rhetoric—the give and take inherent in rhetorical actions. Porter argues “McCloskey’s look at how rhetoric plays a role in economics is different than how rhetorical contexts themselves rely on economic exchange”

(2). In other words, the rhetoric(s) of the marketplace, the ways companies advertise toward and work with the long-tail through the semantic web, only account for a small portion of the reasons why participants engage with the long tail in the first place—why consumers continually decide to create and share in these spaces. Instead, in order to harness the energy of folksonomic spaces, we must appropriately turn our discussion toward the users of these spaces. Participating in the Crowd In the end, proponents of a broadly-based application of the term folksonomy, such as Joshua Porter, tend to argue in favor of folksonomy as a form of organization, claiming it eliminates disconnect “between the user’s words and the words on the site: the user’s words are the words on the site!” (2, emphasis original). And folksonomy detractors, such as Elaine Peterson, trend toward Vander Wal’s original definition, by deploring the move toward user organization, because “traditional classification scheme[s] based on Aristotelian categories yield search results that are more exact” (7). Still others make reference to folksonomy, but choose to use less contested terms, such as “collaborative tagging systems,” in order to prove that stable patterns do indeed emerge in socially networked data structures (Huberman and Golder 1-5). Yet all of these participants enact Web 2.0 social networking practices when they engage with, and at times change or expand, the term “folksonomy,” as they seek to make sense of the growing trend of user tagging, organization, and creation of database materials. In other words, socially organized information systems have clearly reached the web en masse and have much to teach writers/learners/teachers about the ways vibrant knowledge communities might engage with learning through more open systems. The term folksonomy, much like the sites it tries to categorize, is in itself an example of the wisdom of the crowd. While Vander Wal would prefer that those who use his term stick to his original definition, the literacy practices of those involved in the discussion have been, and continue to be, shaped by social networking and the affordances of Web 2.0—including folksonomic practices. Perhaps even without conscious choice, user, architect, and consumer involvement necessitates community interaction that then drives the expansion of social web spaces. In other words, even if researchers and teachers might hope that “expert” definitions will serve students more completely and efficiently than those of the crowd, experts participate in crowd discussions (with its benefits and drawbacks) as fluidly and dynamically as the members of any community. Famously, Bartholome argued students must be taught to “invent the

university”—perhaps, like Porter suggests, students, with teachers, might reinvision how the invention of social and learning spaces might take place. Nevertheless, whether sticking to Vander Wal’s original classification in order to prove or disprove the term’s usefulness, expanding the term to include any social network application that tries to enable equal control by all community users, or choosing less openly contested terms in order to study sites such as Del.icio.us, Flickr, or Wikipedia, most scholars continually return to Vander Wal’s initial contribution—folksonomy (Golder and Huberman; Gruber; Mathes; Peterson; Joshua Porter; Vander Wal). To summarize, for digital scholars folksonomy is: 1. A thesaurus generated through tags and maintained by an Internet-based, social network community in order to navigate Internet based resources (Peterson; Vander Wal). OR 2. Any Internet space generated and maintained by a social-network community that allows users to upload, organize, and revise available materials online, in order to best represent the needs and understandings of the group (Jenkins; Mathes; James Porter; Joshua Porter; Vie). The subtle but important difference emerging between Vander Wal’s initial definition of folksonomy and the crowd’s is like that between Del.icio.us and Flickr: Are users simply tagging and organizing information made available to them, as with Del.icio.us? Or, are they significantly building and changing the landscape, the networks, through the integration of their own knowledge, their own materials, as with Flickr and Twitter? These questions seem to rest at the very crux of the issue for experts across fields: can crowds, organized around social networks, be trusted to know what is best? What about the crowds of individuals found in classrooms? If we posit that the crowd might know what’s best, how does that change or shape discussions of student-centering? Is the educator still responsible for creating a student-centered environment? I would remind the reader that Jenkins uses folk to argue that knowledge communities form around “mutual intellectual interests”; their members “work to forge new knowledge often in realms where no ‘expertise’ exists”; and the “pursuit and assessment of gained knowledge is at once communal and adversarial—an adhocracy which interacts with the long tail.” Jenkin’s’ interest in folk can highlight a clear corporate purpose for current flourishing folksonomic

spaces, one that cannot be ignored. Yet his definition of how experts are formed and seen in relation to complex material sounds achingly familiar to me, a student working through over a decade of coursework, class work, and administrative work inside an academic environment. I would argue a truly folksonomic space, a space intent on following wise crowd theory to its most profound conclusions, must allow community members to not only add or delete whatever content they wish the network to be organized around, but must also hand over primary control of the writing, distribution, and revision of the networked materials—scholars must trust the crowd. In a writing classroom, this means the information students engage with in order to write must be decided and constructed by their information networks, their communities—not the teacher’s. In sum, for digital pedagogues engaged in folksonomic work, folksonomy is: 1. A theory and practice of teaching writ broad that explicitly gives the responsibility of primary control over information as it is displayed, organized, revised, and used, to the community of students, in order that they might by the primary shapers of the landscape of the classroom based on their own knowledge and interests as a social network. AND 2. The teacher pays attention to crowd organization in order to encourage diversity of opinion, through independence and decentralization, eventually becoming the primary coordinator for the learning group. Yet to only agree with Surowiecki’s claims about wise crowds, or to disagree with Vander Wal’s definition of folksonomy, or to limit folksonomy to the Internet-based applications where it is applied, one ignores the “rhetorical genealogy” of both folk and nomos as they have moved through time and space (Queen). Consequently, I would further argue that an understanding of the historical definition of folksonomy highlights the critical complexity enacted through the word’s roots—a complexity that both pedagogues and learners must be made aware. And from this newly situated perspective, I believe that folksonomy, as a critical pedagogical theory grounded in feminism, can be complicated through an enactment of feminist disruption and study of lack theories, in both computer mediated and face-to-face environments.

Chapter Three Folk, Nomos, and Kairos: Folksonomy as a Feminist Enterprise Introduction Many socially networked spaces used in online communications have become predicated on the wisdom of the crowd—a Web 2.0 organizational model that spawned folksonomic theory, where members of a community decide what is and is not included, highlighted, or dismissed (for example, Wikipedia). Jim Porter asks within Rhetoric in(as) a Digital Economy, “What motivates people to create, search, and circulate knowledge?” He believes, “A focus on stylistics misses some of the issue: Rhetoric requires a productive and pragmatic knowledge about how to create information that will matter to people” (2). The productive and pragmatic knowledge Porter references here is inextricably tied to the communities out of which this knowledge is born. Yet, this wisdom, if unchecked, can reproduce the tyranny of the majority over minority through information cascades and bandwagon movements.17 Porter, here, spotlights why individuals participate in the collective, and how individuals know how to participate. He asks, how do they learn to be relevant to, to be rhetorically savvy in, their communities? Yet, I would extend his argument to include the question: what about information that doesn’t matter to the majority? I argue that Porter’s essay misses one issue of concern for educators working on and with socially networked environments. By asking what “will matter” or “matters most” in discussions of folksonomy and crowd activities in the semantic web, without considering what may be excluded or deemed unimportant, we perpetuate a hierarchy of participation predicated on “good” performance. We focus entirely too much on what the majority already knows—the nomoi already put in place by the collective. Consequently, I argue that as rhetorical teachers we might wish to pay better attention to the minority spaces characterized as lack, characterized as “does not matter,” and consider how these neglected spaces might contribute to communities and the framework of socially networked places. By reminding ourselves, as teachers, researchers, practitioners, to look toward past examples of resistance—such as that documented by bell hooks in her discussions of how feminism and race studies came into the American academy—we can

17 Not to mention that many of these online spaces, such as Facebook.com, Twitter.com, and YouTube.com rely heavily on advertising dollars generated through the harvesting of user information; rarely, if ever, do teachers pay particular attention to how these advertising spaces might impact or contradict our classroom goals/ideals (perhaps exacerbated by students’ desires to achieve good grades and accolades within educatory environments). 55

then frame our discussions of folksonomy with minds cast toward valuing and reclaiming what is forgotten, lost, or ignored. It’s not enough to wonder what rhetorics consumers and producers are using, or to speculate on their (in)effectiveness; we must look at how invention takes place. As Porter helpfully argues, “The digital economy needs a view of rhetoric that includes inventional procedures for developing knowledge and for collaborating with audiences to co-create knowledge” (2). In a writerly sense, teachers and students must develop, together, inventional procedures that move toward creating and constructing knowledge in academic environments, much as consumers, creators, and corporations share knowledge in folksonomic environments. Byron Hawk, in his Counter-History of Composition, argues, “A teacher’s pedagogical desires typically have nothing to do with a student’s emergent desires—whether our desires take the form of programs, courses, or subjects” (217). In line with scholars such as Byron Hawk, and his understanding of the untenable differences between most students and teachers, folksonomy, as a type of organization, argues for student direction that is unknowable to the teacher. Because teachers are focused on “educating” and students are focused on “learning,” or at the very least “passing,” teachers and students, at the very root, do not enter the classroom with the same baseline goal. These differences are only exacerbated through the participation of students and teachers in different social networks. Different communities yield different forms and types of knowledge (think back to the example of Ravelry.com in chapter two). A folksonomic community utilizing disruption and lack (as defined by bell hooks, Nancy Welch, and Julie Jung) in order to interrogate their own assumptions and beliefs would then recognize and harness this energy for use by the crowd. By resting in uncertainty and calling attention to contradictions and gaps in classroom communities and online social networks, teachers and students might build richer understandings of institutional and community boundaries together. Encouraging folksonomy as a wise crowd process steeped in uncertainty, on the unknown, shifts the positions of students and teachers to be one of negotiation. Understandings of community, knowledge, what does and does not matter, can then be used to find possible interstitial spaces, where moments of agency and understanding take place—moments of agency, where everyone in the classroom might find the opportunity to speak back to largely patriarchal, institutionally constructed narratives of progress and completion. Again, to predicate classroom instruction on training a community of learners to

contribute “successfully,” we, as educators, run the danger of reproducing majority viewpoints that are less critically reflective than we might wish them to be. In order to lay the ground work for a feminist critique and extension of folksonomic pedagogy—a pedagogy that takes into consideration the different homepoints18 from which teachers and students approach the composition classroom—I focus on the historical, etymological root words embedded within folksonomy. By delineating the Americanized historicization of both folk and nomos, I rhetorically complicate folksonomy as a critical theory more in line with feminist studies discourses. By utilizing the social network, metadata, tagging, and folksonomy definitions built in Chapters One and Two, I will highlight how a framework built around the historical etymology of folksonomy and a discussion of feminist disruption might impact current practices regarding on- and off-line, socially networked composing/learning/sharing spaces and writing education. After a brief examination of the etymological roots of folksonomy, the chapter will next elucidate how these definitions fall in line with a rhetorical conception of kairos and feminist theories that take up the challenge of creating learning environments that foster uncertainty. Third, I argue that by repositioning folksonomy, socially networked classroom environments take fuller advantage of the wisdom of the crowd to develop and sustain curricula that requires students and teachers to critique their own educational nomoi. Last, in participation with the theoretical crowd working with and on folksonomic environments, I offer here a new definition of folksonomy through the inclusion of feminist theories of disruption and an etymological recovery that allows for the emergence of a critically feminist, folksonomic (or CFF) perspective. Folk and Nomos: Or, Folksonomy Historically Defined19 Folk Folk is Germanic in origin (volk), with roots older than Beowulf (“Folk” OED). The vulgarity attributed to “folk,” as demonstrated by Dillon Bustin, a folklorist who specializes in museum services, can be linked to a proto-Indo-European strain of discourse that places individuals in the same category as dough. Bustin states, “My goal here is to recover the derivation from proto-

18 I use homepoint to call attention to the places where teachers and students, as humans, return to, rest in, and interact with one another in different ways again and again. 19 In keeping with the hierarchical, linear organization of the term, folk will first be discussed, followed by nomos, even though nomos has, by far, older historical connotations. 57

Indo-European root *pel- (flour) and its metathesized stem*plëgo- (people) to Greek poltos (porridge) and polis (settlement) to Late Latin ladô (pancake or flapjack) and vulgus (common people) to Gothic folkam, Old English folc, and High German Volk” (118). Here, the reader can see connections between the common people and common foodstuffs—flour, porridge, and flapjack. These commonalities then create communities—“settlements” of “commoners” working together for survival. If anything, the roots Bustin shares would seem to suggest that folk is cultural code for the commoner—a connection not unlike that used by Vander Wal in his original justification for the “folk” of folksonomy. The connection of folk, historically and through Vander Wal’s current use, with “commoner” is a connection educators would do well to remember, especially if they then move to argue that folksonomies are all inclusive. Clearly, by invoking “common,” folk does not include everyone. Much like Bustin’s work, the Oxford English Dictionary highlights folk as a word used to describe “a people, nation, race, [or] tribe,” that can also designate “the great mass,” or “the vulgar,” in “aggregation [or] relation to a superior” (“Folk” OED).20 Here, the basic definition of folk—a definition moving beyond translation and into practice—begins to imply that there are two main traits of any folk interaction: 1) It designates groups of people united by common understandings and/or belief systems as they interact with one another, produce and purchase artifacts, and build or breakdown social networks. And, 2) It exists in constant relation to and negotiation with a hierarchical structure—one which may be seen explicitly, as designated by “a superior,” or implicitly, through words like “vulgar,” and “mass”—perceived as functioning outside of the “folk” group. In other words, one person’s flapjack is another person’s porridge, and both are heavily affected by the forces of power they move, learn, and interact with, around, under, and over. Yet, the history of folk is a long one and, as with all signifiers, carries with it a twisting history that implies both the vulgar and the mass and their opposites. As many contested terms, “folk” is used both against a community—to establish social and cultural lines—and by a community—to note communal relationships that hold and represent power. Bustin continues,

20 And while it would be irresponsible to ignore volk’s associations with Nazi ruled Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I wish to reclaim folk by appealing to a nearly one thousand year living history of the term—highlighted by the many uses of folk within American Standardized English: folk music, folktales, folk art, folk hero, to name just a few (“Folk” OED; “Folk” Wikimedia). 58

It is understandable that folklore as an aspect of popular culture should be likewise vaguely demarcated, for “folk” has such a long history that it may connote both itself and its contrary. Dictionary definitions of “folk” stress that it may mean, first, any and all people in a society, or it may mean, secondly, only the lowest class of people in contrast to an elite. It may mean one’s friends and neighbors, or, contrarily, it may mean only one’s family. (To use other words from Old English, “folk” may mean kith, or kin, or both kith and kin.) …Thus, much of the meaning of “folk” is carried by pragmatic implications of use from instance to instance. (118) What Bustin labels as “pragmatic implications” are really the day-to-day invocations of folk— how people in communities choose to deploy relational markers that indicate their positioning with, for, or against other members with which they interact. The difficulty in pinpointing the capital T, True definition of folk concretizes the slippery nature of the term. It reflects the inability of outsiders to effect real change to the group, or for an outsider to completely understand and participate in the mores necessary to interact in more than superficial ways. Because, outsiders lack the necessary understanding to correctly define relationality in the intimate ways the community requires. Even if those in positions of power use folk as a term to denote status, only the folk themselves fully take part in the daily interactions and understandings that make up any individual people group, so only the folk may name what is and is not, where power is and is not, who is and is not folk. In order to then get at what folk means in the context of folksonomy, it is necessary to turn to the larger social context under which the term may have been most enduringly used. Folk’s American history might be best investigated through an examination of Laurie Kay Sommers’ work on The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife (FAF). The FAF is one of the longest running progenitors of the most extensive definition of “folk,” and through its representation of one of the largest and most revered educational institutions in America, it might best represent the popular understanding of folk. In her 1996 article in the Journal of Folklore Research, Sommers quotes extensively from the brochures provided by the Smithsonian to donors and contributors looking to sponsor the festival with their monies and wares in order to shed light on how “folk” is interpreted by one of the major museums in the United States. Sommers argues that the FAF “began in 1967 and has become one of the largest and most enduring programs of public sector folklorists” (227). As one

of the “largest and most enduring programs,” the Smithsonian’s interpretation of folk culture may best exhibit current educational trends regarding what, exactly, folk is. The Smithsonian pamphlet Sommers quotes from defines folk cultural traditions as not only place-based, but also calls on a tradition born from communal history. “Community-based forms of knowledge, skill and expression learned through informal relationships and exhibiting intergenerational continuity. Typical genres include oral tradition, social custom, material culture and its supportive knowledge, and the folk arts. Forms of folk culture are traditional to the extent that they maintain standards or values which have continuity with, and are informed by, past practice. They are living traditions to the extent that they are practiced, are socially integrated within community life and speak to its cognitive, normative, affective and aesthetic concerns” (OFP 1988b.6). Here, the reader can see the Smithsonian’s heavy emphasis on history through terms such as “intergenerational continuity,” “oral tradition,” “maintain standards or values,” and “past practice.” As “living traditions” the Smithsonian’s definition calls to a present-past. To be labeled as folk, an artifact must represent movement, a dialogic relationship amongst past and present community, self, and object. According to the FAF, and in line with the ever-changing nature of the term “folk” itself, this dialogism is in large part lost when folk forms are appropriated by those outside the immediate community. Folk cultural forms may be appropriated by exogenous individuals and organizations and enter popular or elite culture in refracted ways. “Folk” or “folk rock” music, for example, familiar to most Americans, is a genre of popular culture rather than a form of authentic folk culture. Typically, folk traditions can be said to be non-authentic when they are mediated through exogenous agencies. Such mediation disarticulates a particular folk form from its social, cultural, historical, aesthetic, biographical and ecological context. (OFP 1988b:6) Sommers, above, highlights how appropriation then strips folk of its “authentic” standing when it is taken and used in popular or “elite” culture. Consequently, outsider adoption and use of folk culture renders whatever is proposed by the outsider as non-authentic—it is no longer folk as it is no longer of the group; it has lost its present-past status. Since the contribution to the community is outside the collaborative boundaries of the discourse community, the power of the folk to resonate with community members becomes lost in translation. Folk ways, products, and ideas,

once shuffled into new discourse communities, lose their traction with and in their original contexts. Yet, more so than the artifacts produced by any group of individuals, “folk” is inherently lifestyle and place oriented. The many contributors to Wikipedia have co-created the following definition: “Folk culture refers to the lifestyle of a culture. Historically, handed down through oral tradition, it demonstrates the ‘old ways’ over novelty and relates to a sense of community. Folk culture is quite often imbued with a sense of place. If elements of a folk culture are copied by, or moved to, a foreign locale, they will still carry strong connotations of their original place of creation.” Lifestyle, community, place, all these are central to an understanding of folk and, in my opinion, explain why the outsider can only shift, explain, or use so much of an incoming group’s cultural commonplaces—their nomoi—to “build” a community of practice. Of course, this assumes a homogeneous body of folk, when, quite frequently, new groups formed through the spark of experience or interest may not have many commonplaces with which to return (at least at first). As with Sommers definition through the Smithsonian record, the folk designation loses the traction it has in a place when deployed outside of that place. Primary control must be maintained by the group. Folk, and the culture that accompanies it, relies on a back and forth, the give and take of different cultural constructs with different community members, the permeable boundaries of varying discourse communities as they come into contact with one another. “Folk culture has always informed pop culture and even high culture. The minuet dance of European court society was based on the dance of peasants. More recently, the archetypal costume of the cowboy has been reinvented in gleaming silver by disco dancers and strippers, and the consciously hubristic culture of the Amish has been portrayed for comic value in Hollywood films and reality shows” (“Folk”). Here, again, the reader can see the back and forth of commerce, community, and capital that is intimately related to the use of “folk.” But the difference between popular culture and folk culture is the inward turn that accompanies it—that sense of place, of particular community that imbues the interactions of folk (“folk”). A back-and-forth is necessary, but outside influence loses purchase when removed from the place and space of its entrance into the folk community. In other words, outsiders must make use of folk reliance on the give and take of communities, must labor to produce these moments of inquiry and interest, using the resources inherent to the spaces that they have learned of through

participation in their own educationally driven discourse communities. David Bartholomae notably argued [S]tudents have to appropriate…a specialized discourse, and they have to do this as though they were easily and comfortably one with their audience, as though they were members of the academy, or historians or anthropologists… [T]hey have to invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language, finding some compromise between idiosyncrasy, a personal history, and the requirements of convention, the history of a discipline. They must learn to speak our language. Or they must dare to speak it, or to carry off the bluff, since speaking and writing will most certainly be required long before the skill is “learned.” (403) And while I agree with Bartholomae that a teacher may have resources at her disposal that highlight how she has entered into the academy— how she has invented her university— and that these resources, whether written, spoken, or experienced may help a community, a classroom, to invent their own university, I want to complicate the ways in which this information can or should be communicated. After all, who decides what university should be invented? Through the lens of folk, it cannot be Bartholomae’s “us” if educators hope ways of thinking, ways of analyzing move beyond the classroom. Lee Haring, a professor emeritus of English at Brooklyn College, argues that folklorists, those invested in studying, interacting, and examining folk instantiations of knowledge, are always engaged with the concrete concerns of the community with which they interact. Theorizing about what “makes” folk constructs valuable is only useful to American folklorists as it is applied to specific communities and situations that allow for growth of any one group. American folklorists don’t care much for theory: having left behind the past orientation of their predecessors, they prefer to focus on the actualities of vernacular practice. The American conception of folklore moves its professionals away from the abstract towards the concrete—towards situated interaction among human beings. American folklorists are more likely to accept method than theory; their theoretical insights have turned into method. Their master Dell Hymes advocated starting “from community definitions of situation, activity, purpose, genre, and discover[ing] validly the ways in which communicative means are organized in terms of them.” That program is method, not theory. (3)

Haring’s definition of American folklorists, negative or not, highlights an important point that resonates in the praxis work done by composition and rhetoric scholars—writing theory, teaching theory, rhetorical theory, is only as useful as it is an explication, social interaction, or narrative of what is in place, what could be in place, what should be in place, or what has been in place at any given time. As scholars and teachers we must pursue connections to the concretized day-to-day practices of the communities with which we live, investigate, and interact. We cannot help students invent anything, if we don’t try to know them. Educational theories are only as useful as they are full of use—not to the individual educator but to the educated, both teachers and students alike. Joseph Harris, in his work on “community,” and the problems he sees inherent in the use of the term, falls in line with folk ideas, especially in his conversation of “public,” “material,” and “circulation” (4). Harris discards community in favor of public, material, and circulation because they “can help us imagine our work as teachers as taking place not within the bounded and familiar space of a disciplinary community but in more open, contested, and heteroglot spheres of discourse” (4). Harris, here, argues for a folk understanding of a social network—one interested in difference and uncertainty, more than sameness, completion, or clear ideas. Instead of arguing how “we” can help students join a discourse controlled by a community of educators, Harris urges educators to consider, “a mode of teaching that resists the fusing of social values with the acquiring of critical skills” (4). Harris does not do this to suggest that communities are divorced or separate from knowledge—rather, taking up initiation or imitation as a goal of education forces a closed loop model, shutting off invention driven by convergence. Harris states, “I would continue to insist that our job is not to initiate students into a discrete world we think of ourselves as already inhabiting—to induct them, that is, as members of our disciplines and professions—but rather to help them find ways to use the texts, practices, and ideas we have to offer in discussing issues that matter to them” (5). By shifting the goal of education away from “induction,” Harris and a focus on folk asks teachers to acknowledge difference, not sameness, as the backbone of rhetorical learning, to consider use with learning bodies, instead of for them. One of the most current definitions of folk that takes into account the use embedded in the relationship between the individual and the localized sense of community, born from folk interaction, comes from Henry Jenkins Convergence Culture. Folk is “culture that emerges in a context where creativity occurs on a grassroots level, where skills are passed through informal

education, where the exchange of goods is reciprocal based on barter or gifts, and where all creators can draw from shared traditions and image banks” (325-326). Here the reader can again see the repetition of an implied hierarchical structure through words such as “grassroots,” “informal,” and “barter.” However, Jenkin’s goes on to argue that convergence culture occurs when the different grassroots communities and corporate media outlets intersect, enabling interaction in “unpredictable ways” (2). He defines convergence as “the flow of content across multiple media platforms and industries,” describing the “technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes” of audiences that engage in migratory patterns in order to “search for ideal entertainment experiences” (282). Jenkins’ ideas, while used to theorize how companies work to create effective entertainment for possible consumers in order to generate money for corporations, are also applicable to problem-solving, critical thinking, and invention—a connection he also argues for within Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture. If we imagine that the goods and services to be traded, “bartered” for creation, are ideas, words, rules in technological, industrial, cultural, and social settings, then learning becomes an exchange that students and teachers must engage in together in order to learn and grow with one another (8-9). In a nut shell, to educate a community one must respectfully create opportunities of convergence—moments where the crowd pushes back against/in-between/alongside the university, creates anew, is folksonomic—for both the educator and the educated (12-13). Unfortunately, working against folk convergence and change is most Americans’ belief in the value of expertise. Within Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins argues much of America is locked in the “expert paradigm.” In pop-cultural America, the expert has a stringently defined role that carries with it an awful lot of baggage. To be an expert “requires a bounded body of knowledge, which an individual can master (as opposed to open-ended and interdisciplinary queries)” (52). When we assume that experts exist, when we agree with expertise as an idea, those assumptions “create interior and exterior” members (as opposed to assuming each person can contribute, even if their contributions are uninformed or “ad hoc”) (53). In effect, interior members then “moderate the access and process of information (rules established through traditional disciplines)” (53). Consequently, convergence can’t occur if respect for all participants’ potential expertise isn’t present. Here, again, the reader can see an emphasis on the respect of the individual toward the community and the respect of the community toward the individual. Folksonomic communities rely on all contributions—ad hoc or not.

Instructors, given the expert role assigned to them by the university in the classrooms they inhabit, are interior members and most students, when confronted with the interiority mass produced on the collegiate scale, then set themselves up as exterior members—again, think Bartholome’s Inventing the University, where the ultimate goal is for students to be able to take on the discourse of the academy “legitimately” with “grace and elegance” (415). This is not to suggest that folksonomic communities do not have interior and exterior members. Rather, interiority and exteriority are what defines communities and is a tension that educators must negotiate. One of the few ways to productively maneuver between interiority and exteriority might be to encourage convergence between experts and folk communities, to work toward a collective intelligence that holds much more for both parties than the ideas of any one individual. In this model, information isn’t “passed on” as much as it “passes through,” comes into play with, the communities. At this juncture in the chapter, it might be fruitful to turn toward critical theorist investigations of class struggle, in order to provide needed contextualization for a critical understanding of folk in relation to community practices and place. As Ellen Cushman argues, “We need to study both the struggle and the tools in tandem if we hope to move away from a critical theory that demeans the ones it attempts to uplift, if we hope to characterize the multifaceted ways language carries with it both dissent and compliance in everyday practices” (4). With an artifact or community of practice defined as (folk)sonomic, then, theorists must explore the tools labeled as and as not folk, the use of the tools (intimately connected to community practices and the places those practices occur), and the multifaceted dissent and compliance inherent in any folk space, in order to understand “metacommunicative evaluations [that] indicate…cultural logic about [institutions and] reveal how this cultural logic continually develops from interactions across time and many contexts” (Cushman 220). For a critical folksonomic perspective to exist, the researcher and pedagogue must constantly negotiate and investigate alongside the group in the ever-shifting patterns of definition, creation, and use within and about spaces that are and are not defined as folk. Collective intelligence is not the possession of knowledge (how we identify expertise), but the social process of acquiring knowledge, dynamic and participatory, continually testing or affirming social ties (what an understanding of folk adds to discussions of power). Shared rituals or mutual evaluations are central to the sense of affiliation members feel—without these checks

and balances, the social system congeals, calcifies, and ultimately produces one-way road maps that lack the rich detail available to communities. And as the semantic web broadens the sphere of our social interactions, it also becomes increasingly important to talk about commonalities via a media that redefines the idea of “locality” and where physical location may not most accurately define folk involved in specific nomoi most effectively. For an easy example, think of just one of the online conversations taking place in the folksonomic spaces defined in chapter two. Ravelry.com members find “locality” through a common desire to knit and crochet, even though site members reside in physical places as close as Texas or as far as Japan. The “folk” of folksonomy, then, is both community based and is individual invention. It is an (inter)vention. Folk includes the history of a community, but also a careful attention to its present in order to affect its future. Folk implies both the plebian and the highest forms of art. It is interactive, malleable, and ever-changing. Mary Louise Pratt, in her oft-cited Arts of the Contact Zone, argues that, “Autoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression” are all present in the “contact zone” (4). Contact zones, like the ways in which folk interact with communities outside of its own, are places, spaces, where people come together and invest, intervene, make changes to and explore with the arts in and alongside their lives. And while Pratt argues “miscomprehension, incomprehension, dead letters, unread masterpieces, absolute heterogeneity of meaning” are “some of the perils of writing in the contact zone,” she sees these perils as generative moments invested with possibility (4). This understanding of the ways in which uncertainty might rest in the contact zone also brings to light ways in which folk members might make, interact, work, and play in ways not valued by the entire community—convergence, even if it lacks a large audience, is still productively complicating community discourse. For educators to work with the folk of their classrooms—to listen to the local communities that they are not a part of but are asked to educate, they must, in very concrete and real ways, embrace the contact zones.21 As Pratt contends in relation to contact zones, and I would extend to folk, “When linguistic (or literate) interaction is described in terms of orderliness, games, moves, or scripts, usually only legitimate moves are actually named as part of the system, where legitimacy is defined from the point of view of the party in authority--regardless of what other

21 Legitimization shares much with the Freirian notion of “assistencialization” discussed in chapter one; that cannot be the purview of the educator if folk convergence, the contact betwixt and alongside the academic community, hopes to grow. 66

parties might see themselves as doing” (5).22 One of the greatest lessons from a historical perspective of folk is that homogeneity—community defined and controlled by “experts”—is death to invention. This attention toward community use in relation to, and investigation of, hierarchical structure is only further encouraged through an even deeper historical perspective of nomos. Nomos Roughly six hundred years before folk would arrive on the literacy landscape, at the dawn of the sixth century in Athens, Cleisthenes would rewrite the Athenian constitution, taking the power of the law from the thesmothetes (judges, or “law-givers,” who located the “external source of law” as the “will of the gods”) and placing it in the hands of the nomos (“Cleisthenes”; Jarratt 41; “Thesmothetes”). There are two different definitions and forms of nomos: one denoting “the marking out and distribution of land,” and the other signifying an identification of “human norms as binding” (Jarratt 41). Both derive from the Greek verb nemo23 and acknowledge “human agency” as a concept bound by rhetoric and enacted through a “process of articulating codes, consciously designed by groups of people, opposed both to the monarchical tradition of handing down decrees and to the supposedly non-human force of divinely controlled ‘natural law’” (Jarratt 41-42). Interestingly, Cleisthenes’ revision is credited as the birth of democracy, as Athens transitioned from law as external, god-given, Platonic Truth, or thesmos, to an understanding of law as “consciously designed” by “groups of people” (“Cleisthenes”; Jarratt 41-42). “Groups of people” as the designers and implementers of law speaks to the (at least Cleisthenes’) belief that working in concert with other community members creates an opportunity for the individual to enter into moments of power negotiation—where rules and laws are created that benefit all—including oneself. So, then, if the group is now responsible for the law, where does that leave those outside the group? Susan Jarratt argues that sophists “understood that any discourse seeking to effect action or shape knowledge must take into account differences. Not only was it essential to judge the circumstances at the moment of an oration, its kairos, but even more essential was the orator/alien’s understanding of the local nomoi: community-specific customs and laws” (11). Here, Jarratt positions the orator as the alien—as the one outside the community looking in. The

22 Pratt’s language, here, mimics Freire closely. 23 Nemo is a contraction of “no man”—readers may remember Odysseus’ answer when the Cyclopes asked him his name—but is also related to thread and law (“Nemo”; OED). 67

orator is not folk and may only observe the nomoi for use. So while this outside perspective allows the rhetor a unique point of view regarding community desires, needs, wants, and abilities, the rhetor’s perspective is still of difference: A difference that may be harnessed for observation, negotiation, but not necessarily full participation in the nomoi. In his dissertation, Kenneth Lindblom shares a Heracleitian fragment24 he believes points to the importance of nomos. Heracleitus writes, “the people should fight for the (Nomos) as if for the city wall” (Lindblom 10; Freeman 27). Lindblom argues, “Heracleitus’ fragment illustrates how Nomos stands for the mutual dependence (or interdependence) of two cultural forces: the building of community and the production of knowledge in that community” (10). Along these lines, Lindblom provides a figure that I believe negotiates the interdependence he argues for most concretely. As Lindblom’s “figure 1” demonstrates, community building and knowledge production work to provide the necessary components to create nomoi that then work to interrogate new ideas and information foreign to the community.

Figure Five: Lindblom’s figure 1 Lindblom goes on to reinforce the connection of nomos to convergence, as he argues for a theory of discourse that takes into consideration community ways of knowing: “Without a community there would be no knowledge produced in ways respected by that community; conversely, without a respected system for the production of knowledge there would be nothing tying a community together” (10). The phrase “respected system” is absolutely key when discussing ways communities make and sustain vibrant patterns of invention, creation, and production. If nomoi function as gatekeepers, all outside ideas must first pass through the gate before they are considered by the community. Discussion of classrooms and teachers functioning as “gatekeeper” spaces in composition and rhetoric is not new. In fact, it is this very gatekeeping

24 Lindblom’s fragments are taken from Kathleen Freeman’s Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers. 68

that Batholomae is responding to and working against. Most interactions between teachers and students are not predicated on the respect the instructor has for the learning body.25 Instead, for good or ill, these interactions are based on the expertise of one individual versus the ignorance of the student mass. Yet, at the same time, gatekeeping can also occur on the side of the students. A community of students can just as easily decide that what the educator shares isn’t relevant to them or their areas of interest—and this happens more often than educators would probably like to acknowledge. The tyranny of the majority, whether built from student or administrative communities, can result if the folk gates are left unchecked. If convergence is prevented from happening at either end, both groups suffer the lack. By combining this understanding of nomos with the relationship between folk and convergence culture, one extends the definition of nomos into convergence both within, as argued by Lindblom, and without the community. Yes, nomoi work as border-keepers. Yet as interactions occur between those within and without the community, permeability allows folk (both student and teaching folk) to stay vibrant and current, to change the nomoi in ways beneficial to the group. This interaction, convergence, allows folk to create and experience new ideas and artifacts that then foster a growing and living into old and new nomoi. These folk created nomoi then cycle back to inform and create new folk practices. And while Lindblom goes on to complicate his “figure 1” through the use of H.P. Grice’s “cooperative principle,” at the core of his theories of discourse are two issues: 1. He argues a classroom can function as a community, an argument that does not fully account for the complexity of the relationships between students and teachers. 2. The relationship he sets out with figure 1, between the nomoi and the community, is fairly hierarchical. Perhaps a more inclusive figure, then, would take into account this ryzomatic (non-hierarchical, fluid, yet dependent) understanding of production, invention, and community practice as depicted in Figure Six.

2525 I do not imply, here, that instructors do not respect students, rather that the institutional situation is not predicated on this respect, but is instead predicated on the assumed ignorance of the student in relation to the instructor regarding the subject the student studies. 69

Unlike the hierarchical structure implied in Lindblom’s figure 1 through the community’s position in relation to knowledge production, the reader can see in Figure Six the permeable relationship amongst a community’s knowledge Figure Six: A critical refiguring of the base, production, and invention relationship of nomos to a community practices. Again, yes, nomoi can function as gatekeepers. At the same time, it is not impossible for new ideas to occur to a subject within the community without sanction or agreement from other members. In fact, I believe the new figure is more in line with the connections Lindblom makes throughout the rest of his work, especially in conjunction with the relationhip between nomoi and convergence, without the burden of hierarchy. Yet, if we believe Lindblom’s assertion that, “All knowledge is created through the socio-discursive operations of communities,” we cannot ignore that there are then members inside (folk) and outside (everybody else) of those self-same communities, or the fact that community understanding of said discourses (the nomoi) may unfortunately trump more nuanced individual contribution—on the part of both educator and educated (127). So while the negotiations of knowledge may be more permeable than Lindblom figures, a major challenge most educators must confront is a way to successfully negotiate the inside/outside status granted to them due to their status as “insiders” within the academy and “outsiders” from the folk with which they interact. How then do we work to challenge the nomoi of the student folk, knowing that most contributions will first be filtered through the nomoi of a community from a forced hierarchical position created and maintained by the academy with which educators are a part? Students “listen” to teachers, as teachers are representatives of the overarching collegiate community (as experts) they have chosen to submit themselves to in order to “learn.” Yet, these interactions between students and teachers are often seen as a game—highlighted by testing, grading, and the rest of the hoops student communities are forced to jump through by

administration and the teachers in the collegiate system. These systems, then, highlight that there are folk not of the academy but rather alongside it. Of course despite heavy critiques from educators at all levels, rote learning divorced from purpose has been nothing but reinforced from the time of their entrance into preschool through national standards legislation, such as the No Child Left Behind Act. Consequently, the game of “Can you pass?” has eclipsed most educatory environments’ true purpose—that is, I would argue, to move toward inclusivity through experiential learning: (1) In order to allow community members who do not represent the majority greater access to power; (2) and to remind members with the most access to power their responsibilities regarding their fellow community members. In other words, education should challenge the nomoi in ways that move toward opportunities for convergence that benefit the folk both within and outside of these communities. Students may wish to truly learn, to operate differently from the folk, to disrupt the nomoi in new and challenging ways for the community they are a part of in order that the community might become more complex. Yet, negative transfer from a hierarchized system of testing, ranking, and sorting—not to mention that teachers are not members of the communities they teach—has strongly limited any opportunity teachers have to enact change from the top, down. Teachers cannot create “student- centered” learning opportunities that are then introduced to the community, without it seeming patronizing, assistencializing, and ultimately sliding in to the “Can you pass?” game. Of course, also complicating teachers’ attempts to enact student-centered pedagogies in the classroom is that they too run the danger of highlighting discourses of the majority, instead of complicating community practices by the inclusion of minority standpoints. In order to circumvent this from happening, teachers have got to put aside their desire for control and instead work toward understanding what learning communities want, and how they can listen and disruptively enter into conversation with students in the homeplaces of their experiences— i.e. online and offline situations that create opportunities for the enacting and open investigation of the nomoi by the folk that seek knowledge in and outside of the academy. Perhaps highlighting the difference between and amongst the educator, the rhetor, and the educated, as these positions shift and intersect within, alongside, and without the community, an invoked, localized audience might provide a grounded folksonomic opportunity for the communities inside any given classroom. At any time, education is a shifting experiential

tapestry—given the different materials, goals, and subjects introduced, discussed, and written about by teachers or students, who are being educated, where that education is taking place, and how that education affects the individuals involved. An invoked, localized audience, as a body related to but not inclusive of teacher or students, might help to enact practices that allow the folk room to articulate, shape, and change the nomoi under which they are operating. In other words, if there is an audience with ties to both the teacher and the students that rests outside, but alongside, the classroom—such as future students—this connection might provide a point of entry toward discussion for both the teacher and the students. For example, if current students take over the design of curricular materials for future students of the course, localized and institutionally mandated learning outcomes then become part of the explicit material the course might address, perhaps extending students’ understandings of the connections among personal, professional, and academic goals. Students, from their current position, have unique perspectives as learners currently operating with specific objectives that have a greater likelihood of coming alongside future students. Instructors, from their current position, have a unique perspective as individuals who have and will move through time and place from an interior institutional positionality that seeks to understand and has access to literature about students in relation to curricular trends and movements. Perhaps, instead of focusing on how the educator might enable kairotic, or timely, shifting of the nomoi of the community to be educated, the educator should focus on allowing the community to find these moments themselves. Where might students want to enter into the university sanctioned curricula? Through the inclusion of social networks based on folksonomy in the classroom, the student community takes on the work toward change or understanding of a given subject, and the educator might focus on how disruption might be more openly included to foster invention that complicates the nomoi—for both the present students and instructor and those in the future (inviting the present students to do the same). The educator would move beyond using her understanding of the nomoi of a community (teacher-driven, student-centering) to provoke difference, toward acknowledging difference, acknowledging disruption, conflation, confusion, and the interstitiality—the interinanimation—of all communities. In other words, if the educator calls attention to places within the curricula that students do not place value (by deleting or omitting assignments that deal with it), or pieces of the curricula that they allow to rest unchallenged in their revisioning (by accepting departmental assignments, invention tools, or

purposes without recasting), the community members, the folk, might be encouraged to shift the nomoi from within. These understandings of both folk and nomos can then be applied to the classroom, where respectful intervention through folksonomic collaboration takes fuller advantage of kairotic learning. Kairos Kairos, as a rhetorical concept, comes from the Greek καιρός. In a basic sense, kairos is the “right” moment and place for an action, speech, idea, or object to come into human consciousness. Byron Hawk, in his discussion of kairos, argues that, “[r]ather than pure change or chaos, kairos is complex and requires the rhetor’s ability to participate in the co-adaptive development of a situation by infusing discourse into it” (184). In other words, kairos is participatory in ways that change and randomness are not. Kairos requires an individual, or group of individuals, to enter a moment of fluctuating discourse with a contribution that provides edification for the rest of the group. Kairos is social in nature, requiring action and reaction. Class work, including group work, due to the way it is often planned, through assignments, and implemented, through the completion of projects, is not kairotic in a way that intimately connects with the audience for which it is planned—an audience of students. The concept of kairos is highly influenced by timing (in fact, the word in plural actual means time), but the complex connotations of most communities require a deeper understanding of what this timing might entail. In the 2002 publication Rhetoric and Kairos, James L. Kinneavy’s contribution states, “In order to read into the notion of kairos its full connotations…it is necessary to establish its rich dimensions. In additional to the rhetorical, they embrace ethical, educational, epistemological, and aesthetic levels, all of which are linked to each other” (61). Consequently, while educators may feel the work they assign is kairotic in the sense that it is timely in a student’s education, this view ignores the complex relation of kairos to any given community. It is a dead kairos that does not live beyond the confines in which it was born because it relies on an outsider’s (the teacher’s) understanding of timing, ethics, education, epistemology, and aesthetics. One of the most popular—and oft cited—definitions of kairos comes from Eric Charles White’s 1987 publication Kaironomia: On the Will-to-Invent. White argues that kairos inherently has two meanings different than the more common word for the passage of time, or chronos.

Kairos is an ancient Greek word that means ‘the right moment’ or ‘opportune.’ The two meanings of the word apparently come from two different sources. In archery it refers to an opening or ‘opportunity,’ or more precisely a long tunnel-like aperture. Through which the archer’s arrow has to pass. Successful passage of a kairos requires, therefore, that the archer’s arrow be fired not only accurately, but with enough power for penetration. The second meaning of kairos traces to the art of weaving. There it is the ‘critical time’ when the weaver must draw the yarn through a gap that momentarily opens in the warp of the cloth being woven. Putting the two meanings together, one might understand kairos to be a passing instant when an opening appears which must be driven through with force if success is to be achieved. (qtd. in Sipiora 18) As many scholars have argued, and perhaps most importantly, the archer and the weaver know exactly when to fire, when to loose the arrow, the string, in order to be successful. So, most users of White focus on “opportunity” and “critical time.” However, I would instead like to draw attention to sources. The archer and the weaver: two long standing members of many different communities that span both time and place, both with crafts that require patience, specific skills, practice, and both, through mentorship, natural inclination, tradition, and/or exposure to the art. While the archer and the weaver may be singular entities, they most certainly are figures, providing (at the very least) very real communal necessities of food and clothing. It’s also interesting to note that the jobs together connote sport and art. Folk tied to communities of practice that sustain training and tradition, yet also challenge it—with new and varied experiences that then build, change, and shape these practices for the future in ways that directly edify communities. Of course, viewing kairos as a transactional moment conditionally created through community then necessitates an understanding of the inability for kairos to exist on a continuously sustainable level transferred from an outsider to a community. Therefore, implementing coursework constructed solely from the instructor’s ontological perspective imposes a general schema of organization that has the gross potential to be largely arhetorical for the student community. Instead, I would argue as Hawk does within Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity that, “Composition theorists should be striving to develop methods for situating bodies within ecological contexts in ways that reveal the potential for invention, especially the invention of new techniques, that in turn reveal new

models for action within those specific rhetorical ecologies” (206). I believe implementing opportunities for folksonomic organization fall directly in line with a call that encourages the invention of new techniques through a new model for action and interaction that is kairotically dependent on a community of students taking and sustaining action for and with one another throughout their educational experiences. Potential Kairotic, Folksonomic Practice For example, Ira Shor often writes about his experiences with students as they try to create democratic classroom practice together. His text When Students Have Power Negotiating Authority in a Critical Pedagogy gives close and careful attention to how one group of students shaped a writing course through picking generative themes, establishing their right to protest course discussions, and staffing an after class group that worked to deconstruct how time in class could be better spent (Shor 105-125). What’s so interesting about this moment in the text is that the class actually became more democratic because of Shor’s undemocratic demand for an attendance policy (one that would affect student grades at the end of the semester through contract grading).26 In a critically folksonomic classroom, Shor would have needed to produce resources that backed up his demand for attendance, as well as provided the means for students to research why attendance was or was not needed. Questions such as what the college’s attendance policy was, what attendance has to do with learning, or even why the course was required by the college in order for students to move toward certain degrees could have been investigated by the group as a whole—questions that fall well within the parameters of the course’s “utopia” theme by questioning the value of a formally educated populace.27 Refocusing the course on attendance may have shifted the coursework into a space where Shor himself was unfamiliar. He would no longer have been able to rely on his expertise in course materials, nor his understanding of the underlying themes within the coursework he had chosen in order to undergird classroom time with “productivity.” However, the classroom would have become a socially-networked space on the part of the students—as they negotiated their own nomoi in conjunction with, or in response to, academic community practices—and the part of Shor, as he grappled with his own

26 Which, of course, begs the question for me: if students had not been led by Angela to protest the attendance policy, what real changes to the traditional classroom space would have occurred aside from contract negotiations? 27 Instead, Shor gave an impromptu impassioned speech about what he would do in the classroom to make time worthwhile for the students—a speech he argues didn’t make much of an impact and therefore led to the course changes (111). 75

positionality within a folk of academics that value attendance as a primary way of making community. Certainly Shor’s text shows that students were engaged with the curriculum, and solid learning is demonstrated, by both Shor and the students in the work, but I find myself questioning if this is all we can hope for. Throughout the experience with the utopia class, Shor recounts moments of his own resistance that I believe could be negotiated more fluidly within a folksonomic curricula focused on uncertainty, lack, and the delay of clarification. I am arguing for pedagogy where the instructor functions as an uncertain learner alongside the learners in community with one another that populate the course she or he is teaching. When Shor claims in the beginning of the text that he “nearly lost the class,” when he insists on an attendance policy without clear articulation of the purpose (beyond his own gut desire), and when he recounts how much “heat” he has received from students for continuing to assign Walden II even though they insist it is a “bloody bore,” he reasserts ownership of the classroom space, showing how difficult it is for experts to give up what we think of as “ours” (4, 208). He reenacts what he sees as a “common weakness of intellectuals”—“trouble recognizing the obvious and doing the sensible” (2). I believe this weakness ties in to a fundamental issue, one Surowiecki argues stems from “the notion that power ultimately has to reside in a single place— a single person—if it’s really to work. We want there to be one person we can point to…and we fear that if we don’t have that, nothing will get done” (281). I believe that critical social networking practices, critical folksonomy, rest within this interstitial space between individual and group, expert and crowd, where grouped individuals resist the urge to place the responsibility of “recognizing the obvious and doing the sensible” in the hands of the expert through critical investigation of hierarchy and community nomoi in relation to the local folk. The rhyzomatic relationship amongst kairos, nomos, and folk that might be possible in a social networked classroom relying on folksonomic theory falls in line with Hawk’s call, when he argues instructors must work to recognize that the differences between their own desires and that of their students can have a significant impact on the ways we are able to make meaning together in classroom spaces. Again, as he notes, “A teacher’s pedagogical desires typically have nothing to do with a student’s emergent desires—whether our desires take the form of programs, courses, or subjects” (217). So when Shor institutes ways in which his students can speak back to his classroom practices, his desire for control clashes with the students’ desires in ways he

cannot understand or control. As Hawk further argues, “Teachers cannot determine their students’ desires; we cannot make them need what we think they need” (219). Thus educators cannot from their positionality as experts determine what students will believe they do and do not need. In other words, teachers, if they are focused on providing students with democratic classroom experiences, instead of being focused on what the folk may decide they want for themselves, inevitably end up inadvertently assigning importance and foci to the materials, projects, conversations that occur throughout the course. I’m not willing to believe educators are unable to transfer at least some of the energy, use, and kairos of folksonomic projects into the classroom simply because students are conditioned well before they enter the classroom in how and what they are supposed to think about the work that goes on inside them. As I’ve tried to show, I agree with Hawk when he states, “One thing liberatory pedagogy tends to sidestep is the fact that students can and do see teachers as embodying the power of law, no matter how much the teacher may genuinely want to help them. Help can be patronizing when distributed downward from a point of authority” (211). At the same time, feminist pedagogies focused on embracing lack and delaying clarification complicate one of the greatest ways communities have been significantly discussed and enacted in the 21st- century—in ways beneficial for both teacher and student. Educators need to be willing to let communities imagine and build more of themselves, if they hope to break well-established patterns of learning that assume the educated cannot really be educator. Feminist Disruption and Folksonomy Critical feminist theories, as applied toward pedagogy, can explicitly work with social networks maintained folksonomically in two distinct ways: 1) When used to interrogate folksonomy, feminist theories can question and disrupt the allure of an uncritical folksonomic stance--problematizing the appeal of ignoring what is not in order to praise what is. 2) When combined with folksonomy, pedagogies based on the feminist understanding of uncertainty and disruption can be enacted in such a way as to more critically enter in to the digital lived experience of individuals by celebrating the wisdom of the social network and repositioning the idea of expertise. In this section, explicit attention will be given to feminist scholars bell hooks, Nancy Welch, and Julie Jung in order to complicate discussions of folksonomy with feminist pedagogies that rely on disruption and lack as key components of learning and making meaning with and through writing. While many digital scholars have spoken about how social networking

can be integrated into the classroom in order to foster communication between students and teachers (Michelle Navarre Cleary, Suzanne Sanders-Betzold, Polly Hoover, and Peggy St. John 2009), expand classroom audiences (Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher 2008), and heighten students’ awareness of the arguments made and received moment by moment in online settings (Jordynn Jack 2009, Melissa Fore, Kara Moloney, and Margaret Strain 2009), few have argued how these spaces can be used to foster disruption and uncertainty through feminist pedagogy. For example, one of the most recent articles in Computers and Composition details how two researchers—Chris Anson and Susan K. Miller Cochran—used a wikispace to encourage a “vertical knowledge-building model” in a graduate course. The authors argue, and highlight through their abstract, that “emerging technologies can help to create constructivist learning environments that challenge students to participate more actively in their own education” (38). Active participation was sought by the researchers in order to “engage students in knowledge- building,” and to provide links to “subsequent sections of the course” in an “ongoing, purposeful activity that functions both within and beyond the classroom” (38). They argue that by creating and maintaining a wikispace that moves beyond the confines of a singular classroom, “the diverse voices of graduate students” would be encouraged “to be heard and to be a part of shaping the curriculum and their own knowledge” (40). And while I agree that wikis can be used to help students take more control over the content of a course, Anson and Miller Cochran’s continued emphases on “care,” “structure,” and “seamlessness” throughout the piece undermine any significant moments of ownership that might have happened through an acknowledgement of lack or significant disruption of the materials on the part of either the students or the instructors. Instead of turning toward disruption, the delay of clarity, or the embracing of lack in the wikispace as a way to modify the course toward more successful collaboration, they instead turn toward “seamlessness” and hierarchical control—as the educator must assume more power in order to assign the right materials and assignments. Anson and Miller Cochran assert that the instructor must include “carefully structured activities” in order for “the greatest possibility for successful collaboration between participants in the class, including both students and the instructor” (43). Consequently, while the researchers made sure to convey to students that the “nascent wiki was designed to be built,” and desired that students would participate in more than “marginally engaged ways,” by “restructure[ing] the foundational space of the wiki,” they are

ultimately disappointed when, “traditional, hierarchical patterns of teaching and learning persisted in spite of the inclusion of the wiki” (44-45). Here, I read a paradox: while “success” for student participation would require major restructuring (a process that rarely if ever comes without some disruption, uncertainty, and/or lack), in most respects the authors focus on the students as builders and the instructors as designers, because they believe the wiki must be used “seamlessly” (a word they place in conjunction with “effectively”) (46). For the authors, disruption is considered as a method of changing the power structure graduate students may view in education, but not as a method of engaging with the wiki (46). The authors contend there are only two options, “we either must convince students that the wiki is truly a collaborative space (complicated by the process of assessing individual achievement), or we must accept the role of leader-facilitator and structure the space in a way that facilitates the kinds of learning to which we are committed” (46). So while the authors move toward “ask[ing] students to reflect on this experience… by involving them in various kinds of self-assessment activities,” the nature of collaboration in a wiki—moving toward clarity and complexity—is not challenged.28 In the end, they conclude, “the instructor has to carefully design activities that will help students interact with each other (and with the instructor as a collaborator in the process)” (46). Through feminist pedagogy, I would imagine a third-space—one that makes the object of the wiki not to build toward an ever-increasingly complex network of information where users attempt to bring further clarity to the contributions of others, but a place where students enter in to disrupt the discourse, highlight the lack, and rest in uncertainty.29 Why not ask students to contribute questions to the wikispace? This practice would then disrupt the “building” of knowledge characterized by the student contributions of further clarity. Students could also be asked to trouble contributions by playing Peter Elbow’s “Doubting Game” as readers to provide counter-arguments to statements, in order to highlight lack. Last, students could be encouraged to state what they don’t know, understand, or take-away from a text or texts in the wiki, placing uncertainty at center-stage, encouraging disruption. Yet these options were not discussed within the article and further highlight why I read Anson and Miller Cochran as moving toward, but not yet embracing, a feminist pedagogy.

28 Nor, I might note, is the grading schemata. 29 This is not to suggest that all wiki projects are inherently flawed. Rather, a different goal may have resulted in findings more in line with the desires of Anson and Miller Cochran. 79

By feminist pedagogy, I mean pedagogy that through bell hooks’ definition of disruption, enacts practices that call for the educator to come alongside the educated—where reflexivity for both teacher and student becomes one of the primary goals for instruction, and where the learning environment is shaped by the desire to pay attention to, and work against, domination, with an attention toward lack and the delay of clarification, as defined by Nancy Welch and Julie Jung. The pedagogue uses her institutional knowledge and understanding of best practices to negotiate and highlight information and/or practices the community is either resisting or encouraging. A call to use feminist practices when engaged with folksonomic pedagogy is supported by the work of Kristine Blair, Radhika Gajjala, and Christine Tulley in the 2009 edited collection Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice. Blair, Gajjala, and Tulley see best cyberfeminist practices as those that offer “personal support and friendship, trust, a genuine interest and care for other members, combined with solid professional advice and mentoring” (7). And while communal care and interest mark the best practices for the authors, so too does a commitment to diversity. As the authors note, “cyberfeminist technological practices are about trying to make technology work for diverse members of the community…with varying material, linguistic, and cultural access to computer-based literacies” (14). Thus, a folksonomic space focused on cyberfeminist practices can then highlight diversity—or the lack thereof—in socially networked spaces. Ultimately, feminist folksonomic pedagogy works as a method of rhetorical study through which both students and teachers enter into debates and uses of social networks, and falls in line with a goal Mary Hocks notes in “Cyberfeminist Meets Digital Rhetoric,” where cyberfeminism “offers researchers and students opportunities to develop activist rhetorics about techno-science, gender and other identities, and cultural practices” (235). This dissertation project provides one answer to Hocks’ call regarding college level cyberfeminist practice, where educators “develop classes that engender the kinds of creativity and spontaneity that give students something to say, but also tools to critique and subvert dominant cultural discourses” (239). Disruption, the delay of clarification, and the embracing of lack are three ways educators might further complicate cyberfeminist practices in folksonomic spaces in ways that call on a history of feminist practices that have been present through the academy since the 1960’s. A Short History of Feminist Disruption

While feminist work is much older and varied than what was happening in the 1960’s in the colleges of America, I take much of my definition of feminist disruption from bell hooks’ historical perspectives in Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. hooks uses Teaching Community to trace the American academic focus on critical pedagogy back to feminist presence in the academy spawned from “the success of militant black anti-racist work” in the nineteen- sixties to the nineteen-eighties (3). Consequently, critical pedagogy enacted in American universities, in hooks’ perspective, is intimately linked to feminist, anti-racist work. Yet, this is not only work completed by militant, black anti-racists. hooks explains, “While every citizen of this nation, white or colored, is born into a racist society that attempts to socialize us from the moment of our birth to accept the tenets of white supremacy, we can choose to resist this socialization. We must accept that people of color are as socialized as our white counterparts. If we can resist, so can they” (56). As a result, the responsibility to move against community practices that repress and segregate in the name of order and education is the responsibility of all teachers, especially those invested in the support of critical, reflective thinking. The responsibility hooks calls for—to disrupt patriarchal, white domination through education—more often than not, hooks believes, is taken up by women educators. She states, “Within the patriarchal academy, women have consistently learned how to choose between the sexist biases in knowledge that reinscribe domination based on gender or the forms of knowledge that intensify awareness of gender equality and self-determination” (2). Consequently, hooks argues that women—as feminist scholars—have consistently worked to disrupt the domination that patriarchal academic practices time and again inscribe on the hearts and minds of would be scholars: “Trusting our ability to cope in situations where racialized conflict arises is far more fruitful than insisting on safety as the only basis for bonding. More than any other movement for social justice, the feminist movement has promoted forms of critique that challenge white- supremacist theory and practice” (3). hooks suggests that feminists more often promote “forms of critique” because they work toward trust, of self and other, that enables them to cope in ways other community groups do not. Feminists, then, have worked, through disruptive measures, alongside academic community discourse in order to question norming predicated on race and sex. Through choices that underscore the ways in which gender functions in the academy, female scholars then began to change the face of scholarship at the university.

American feminists, hooks states, influenced by a diversified student body, began to infuse anti-racist practices into their work. Because as feminist classrooms grew to attract “a diverse body of white students and students of color,” work toward gender equality enabled “individual black women/women of color, along with individual white women allies in anti-racist struggle,” to bring “a critique of race and racism into feminist thinking that transformed feminist scholarship” (hooks 4-5). This transformation of thinking by feminists brought about a break and realignment of higher education in two distinct ways: (1) The disruption of patriarchy through the inclusion of women feminists in positions of power (as teachers) within higher education; (2) and the disruption by black women/women of color and white women anti-racist allies of early feminist practices, in order that critiques of race and racism might be included within feminist studies. Consequently, hooks works to illuminate how a change in the academic definition of folk disrupted the nomoi of that folk from the inside in ways that fostered critical reflection and practice in regards to race and class. In other words, as the reader can see, much of hooks’ critique and understanding of feminist work in the 1960’s, leading into the classroom practices of the 1980’s is predicated on how communities, of women feminists and feminist allies, worked within and without the academy to change the nomoi of the hegemonic collegiate body through critique meant to break apart exclusive, dehumanizing practices. hooks believes that these feminist critiques of racist and patriarchal practices directly foster strong communal ties that work against domination. She states, “To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to perpetuate domination” (36). This vigilant awareness requires feminist pedagogues to actively undermine racist and sexist practices engaged in by the communities with which they teach, live, and work, in order to build new ways of knowing that continuously move toward inclusivity and understanding. Instead of giving in to critiques of the academy that argue community practices must be situated in “real world” situations, hooks contends that education is always intimately connected to the home lives of those who engage in it. “Rather than embodying the conventional false assumption that the university is not the ‘real world,’ the democratic educator breaks through the false construction of the corporate university as set apart from real life and seeks to re-envision schooling as always a part of our experiential lives. When teachers support democratic education we support literacy” (36). hooks, here, argues for the link between learning and democracy

through a re-envisioning of the position schooling takes in the lives of both educator and educated. Ways of knowing are always intimately experiential. Experience is situated in community. Literacy is the way by which communities transmit experience—the ways by which folk create nomoi. Consequently, on both the part of the educator and the educated, past and current lived experiences frame the ways we enter into education. These experiences coalesce for discourse communities into the nomoi through which they approach educational settings. Only by reintegrating the academy into the network of these lived experiences can we then hope to allow for change, through disruption, in the nomoi of the communities with which we interact. Approaching literacy from a communal perspective articulated through experiential memory relies on theories of feminism in order to create and shape nomoi. If we, as college educators, fail to acknowledge the links by which we live, if we fail to see our work as experientially connected to the educational systems students have been, and will continue to be, exposed to, we will fail to influence the folk with which we work in significant ways— opportunities for the community to shape and create the nomoi by which they live, through new learning opportunities, will stagnate, as will the learning that occurs in academic spaces. Learning that Lives—and by living, I mean growing, community affirming, learning opportunities—hooks argues, disrupts authoritarianism and creates an opportunity for magic: “Undermining education as the practice of freedom, authoritarianism dehumanizes and shuts down the always present ‘magic’ when individuals are active learners. It makes study repressive and oppressive” (p. 43). The magic hooks alludes to is what can be captured by folk communally as they pushback, disrupt through invention, against repressive authoritarian practices that undermine experiential education. The magic of these moments rests in the turn toward more inclusive thinking and doing. Thinking and doing that takes into greater account the differences present in unique learning bodies—differences that, once utilized, make for a stronger, more reflective, more vibrant discourse community, as it responds, re-acts, and inter-acts in dynamic ways (as it works and engages in play with the convergence). Truly, this is the magic of learning we all wish to encourage. The pushback of the folk, through the integration of new information and practices in the nomoi in response to experiential education afforded to them over time, creates open spaces, generative magic. A social network, such as Ravelry mentioned in Chapter Two, when exposed to new ways of making and doing, opens up a space to investigate and learn (through

commenting, tagging, and reposting). A system of generative conflict and growth can be applied to the classroom if that system is encouraged to focus on disruption as a main way of making meaning. Disruption, as a major component of a living social network, can encourage new ways of knowing and learning in a system (the academy) that can seem largely closed to students— especially if those self-same students find themselves representing minority races, ages, sexes, sexual orientations, social statuses, or bodies. As hooks warns, “If we are not able to find and enter the open spaces in closed systems, we doom ourselves by reinforcing the belief that educational systems can’t be changed” (74). Consequently, if we do not allow folk opportunities to challenge their own nomoi by allowing for experiential education that co-exists both within and without the academy (experiences largely shaped in on and offline spaces that ask for active participation in the construction and use of knowledge as it is both created and organized by communities in folksonomic ways), we calcify learning experiences and contradict our own ideas about the possibility of education to invoke change in positive and productive ways for communities. This calcification of learning, hooks asserts, enforces the “notion of service” as inextricably tied to work completed “on behalf of the institution, not on behalf of students and colleagues”—undercutting the very purposes most participants in folksonomic projects have when they contribute and critique contributions made by other members of the community (83). Disrupting the Nomoi of Folk Like hooks’ feminist call to re-envision the purposes of education for students and teachers by acknowledging that educational moments are intimately linked to the lived experiences of learners both within and without the academy throughout their educational history, Nancy Welch’s Getting Restless: Rethinking Revision in Writing Instruction argues that writing, especially through revision, is a feminist project focused on “lifework”30—work that creates life, moments of disruption that lead to discovery and growth. Welch insists that real revision of any idea does not necessarily connote a movement toward clarity, concision, or even “getting it right.” Instead, she asks educators to center discussion of revision and, I would argue, discussions of changing the nomoi, on the main concepts within Ann E. Berthoff’s Forming/Thinking/Writing: “How does who do what and why?” “What difference does it make?” and What’s the opposite case?” (HDWDWW). HDWDWW then foregrounds Welch’s discussion of revision when she argues, “[W]e should consider revision not only as a process of

30 Welch takes this term from psychoanalysis. 84

increasing orientation toward a particular thesis, position, or discourse community, but also as a process of increasing dis-orientation: an act of getting restless with received meanings, familiar relationships, and prefigured disciplinary boundaries, a process of intervening in the meanings and identifications of one’s texts and one’s life” (7). Consequently, by encouraging restlessness, educators enact a process of re-visioning through HDWDWW, not for clarity and concision, but ultimately for complexity—driving toward a goal of opening space, opening ideas, creating an opportunity for lifework, where the folk may investigate the nomoi making up their lives both within and without the academy. Julie Jung—as a feminist working through Welch and Berthoff—argues that for re-vision to truly be revisionary, instructors must be willing to give more space to chaos by postponing clarity.31 Revision is intimately connected to disruption. Predicated on active reflection, revision requires a writer, artist, speaker, actor, creator, to disrupt, to interrupt, an artifact, an idea, a project in motion, in order to more accurately negotiate meaning with the intended or experiential audience. There is no revision without disruption, just as there is no disruption without reflection. Consequently, an observed artifact that has undergone any purposeful change, at any given time, by the author or by those engaged in fair use, represents the rhyzomatic relationship amongst revision, reflection, and disruption. Instead of viewing these three processes as hierarchical, or arranged in a linear time model, a folk view focused on disruption through convergence would instead argue that an author’s piece blends change, memory, and difference during the writing process as the writer comes into contact with differing options, systems, and beliefs. Change to an online wiki (disruption of a current text), for example, embodies a revisionary process that takes into account what has come before (reflecting) and what is not present (lack) concurrently, before, during, and after the change takes place. As educators, then, we must teach revision, not as a process of creating clarity, concision, and completion, but rather as a process of engaging the complex relationship between self and community, author and audience, the imaginary and the concrete, the past as it is always continuously embedded in the future, the social and internal. We must investigate ways we might allow folk to rest in these interstitialities—the space in between space—as they continuously re-negotiate the possibilities of their communal nomoi.

31 I use chaos, here, as defined by Peter Elbow: the writerly process of “giving up control” in order to complicate what is known (30-32). 85

Julie Jung urges pedagogues toward disruptive practices. She argues educators must teach revision as “a process of delaying clarification of meaning so that differences can be heard, explored, and understood” (3). Jung further concludes that most classroom revision practices encourage “consensus over difference,” and believes educators must pursue theories of revision that motivate “students to hear a full range” of voices (6-7, emphasis original). Of course, Jung’s call makes visible “perception,” a writing process first described by Ann Berthoff as “differentiation and selection, amalgamation and elimination” (47). Jung’s text goes on to show how perception practices focused on acknowledging a range of voices instead of consensus can be carried out on an individual level through the inclusion of multigenre texts as an assignment in the writing classroom. Jung, within Revisionary Rhetoric, Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts, provides two ways theories of feminist disruption can be applied to multigenre texts. Jung argues that in order to complicate theories of revision relying on progress and completion as key learning outcomes, instructors must make delaying clarification and embracing lack two of their primary goals (3, 152-153). When instructing students in the process of writing, she believes multigenre texts, completed individually by students, to be particularly situated toward investigating both clarification and lack. Jung believes delaying clarification can be done through inviting students to purposefully construct multigenre texts to include metadiscursive commentary. And while I agree with Jung regarding multigenre texts, I believe delaying clarification and embracing lack can also be enacted through folksonomic pedagogy, extending Jung’s theories to push for community, not just an understanding of individual, change. A folksonomic pedagogy concerned with uncertainty would push revisionary boundaries past the individual into the community’s social network—an intertextuality predicated on the wisdom of the crowd. The larger theoretical concerns Jung takes on, focusing on the academic desire to paper over difference, disconnect, and lack, in preference for images of coherence, clarity, and concision, are applicable to discussions of folksonomy—where, at times, educators trumpet success of socially networked folksonomic spaces by their demonstration of coherent, clear, “complete,” online texts. Think back to Anson and Miller Cochran, as they argue for more carefully constructed control in an effort to have a successful course wiki. Instead of giving in to binary thinking, Jung calls for a re-imagining of the rhetor as “revisionary.” As she argues, “Revisionary rhetors demonstrate their commitment to hearing difference by privileging the

centrifugal forces in a given discourse—voices that disrupt unifying tendencies to blur the binaries of reading/writing, theory/practice, content/form, and public/private” (p. 10). The revisionary rhetor described by Jung above is one committed to the feminist practices outlined by hooks. By pursuing difference, by giving space and time to the voices that question the majority voice of the folksonomic community, the revisionary rhetor then enacts feminist disruption through the blurring of binary thinking. The revisionary rhetor is one needed in classrooms working with and in the semantic web, especially those that claim folksonomic roots. Communities operating on folksonomic systems continuously seek through innovation, in order to implement the newly internalized “best” practices, ways of knowing, seeing, thinking, hearing, and learning. Yet, if one accepts the premise that folksonomic spaces are in danger of reproducing the tyranny of the majority over the minority, then it is only necessary that the rhetor, as a feminist practitioner working to problematize hierarchical, repressive patriarchal learning structures, then shift her role to be one of problematizer, disrupter, and ultimately, listener. Listening, most aptly described by Krista Ratcliffe’s Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, frames the community discourses of understanding and (ex)(in)clusivity (17). The revisionary rhetor, as she joins the community in seeking both what is and is not, must deploy rhetorical listening in order to agitate the folksonomic space—in order to push for difference, complication. Through listening, aggregating, and attempting to help name the forgotten or ignored, the rhetor can make opportunities for kairotic change available to the communities with which she works. As Jung believes, “We must start contending, learning from, paying attention to, disconnect” (p. 11). In a folksonomic space, we must contend with what is ignored, forgotten, or that which rests unfound, so that we might problematize the desires for clarity and completion of the discourse communities we work alongside. And through open contention, the nomoi of the folk might be encouraged to shift on multiple levels, accommodating the different, the forgotten, and the lost. By implementing “silence and listening, margins and borders, and reading and responsibility,” in the role of the revisonary rhetor, the folksonomic pedagogue has the opportunity to, instead of focusing on communicating what folk need to know, focus on what the community has chosen not to know, in order to “highlight the disconnects which may occur” amongst the folk, nomoi, and the academic discourses they find themselves interacting with in their participation in academia (Jung 13).

The reader might wonder why discussions of disruption must critically enter into the work being done by those arguing for folksonomic spaces in the classroom, if the rhetor must already pay attention to ways in which the community understands the discourses of the academy. What becomes “most” important—highlighting difference or working toward stasis, so there is a basis of mutual intelligibility? Yet denying interstitiality, by pushing the folk we interact with toward clear, concise, concrete prose born from academic conversations, works to silence the voices of change that hooks argues so passionately for—it’s to deny magic and fall prey to the very forces of control that so many writing educators bemoan. Pushing for clarity and concision as the primary goals of writing instruction denies the community the very real opportunity to reimagine the nomoi by which they filter ideas of power, knowledge, and experience. I agree with Jung as she argues, “To deny this discomfort,” by making clarity the goal of our writing classrooms, “is to ignore the presence of dissenting voices, to refuse to hear and contend with difference” (40). By ignoring, silencing, or outright asking for the removal of dissenting voices, we falter in our goal of allowing space for kairotic learning moments (hooks’ magic) driven by the communities themselves. We insert hierarchy, falsely arguing from a position outside the community that we know “what’s best.” In turn, this control then silences argument and dissent and prematurely moves the community toward false resolution (or Freire’s massification), resolution that Jung states, and I believe, “breeds satisfaction but muffles the tension in learning as a process” (121). This muffling silences some of the most productive spaces of the community—as learners grapple with attitudinal ideas and ways of knowing on which they rely (nomoi). Disruption, and the tension that accompanies it, has the possibility to make a kairotic interstitial space that works with, against, and alongside the majority. The question then becomes, how might the revisionary rhetor enact a disruptive presence focused on the delay of clarification, embracing of lack, and folk desires and aversions in folksonomic spaces in ways most beneficial to the communities with which they work? Feminism’s critique of white patriarchal hegemony, through disruption and an attention toward lack, defined through bell hooks, Nancy Welch, and Julie Jung, must complicate an understanding of nomos and the practices of a folksonomic pedagogue. After all nomos, even with its resistance to monarchic and divinely controlled law, was still only used to recognize how

elite, ruling class males might enact “democracy” in sixth century Athens.32 Consequently, feminism reminds scholars that disruption of hegemony with direct focus on both gender and race is a key component to the growth and continued value of any community. Feminist disruption can also be used to argue for the value of folksonomic spaces within the academy—as it interrupts “business as usual” within learning spaces. If Anson and Miller Cochran had integrated questioning, instead of answering, as the primary purpose of the wiki, if Ira Shor had allowed the course to shift to a discussion of why “attendance” as a concept held so much sway in education, if teachers that work with crowds employ rhetorical listening to bring moments of community silence to the fore of course discussions, “business as usual” in each of these situations would be disrupted. A delay of clarification would be encouraged. Lack, as a concept predicated on what is not would be utilized as a productive, emerging interstitial space of value. But what happens when students, even when given the opportunity and encouragement to construct open, exploratory spaces that include difference, critiques of hierarchy, and metacommentary within a folksonomic space, choose not to disrupt linear narratives that rely on heteronormative hegemonic constructs? Jung’s discussion of lack provides a way for instructors, as they act in their capacity as aggregators for the community, to address these concerns—as educators encourage students to search for lack through their own explicit modeling of rhetorical listening, instead of moments of clarity and concision, as they work with writing. Instituting a folksonomic pedagogy that delays clarification by focusing on lack and disruption would require that educators encourage difference over consensus and that a full range of voices be included within the social network (otherwise the work of the community would lose its “wisdom”).33 And by asking students to continually complicate, revisit, and construct community materials—not to reach consensus, but to represent diverse opinions—within a network that privileges generative conflict, attention is drawn not only to the individual’s ability to enter in, but to the community’s ability to accommodate difference. The “delay of clarification” and the embracement of “lack,” as defined by Jung, can be heightened when individuals are asked to contribute to collaborative projects, as contributors must negotiate with

32 For an in-depth critique of the uses of nomos and democracy in fifth and sixth century Athens, see Susan Jarratt’s Rereading the Sophists Classical Rhetoric Refigured and Jasper Neel’s Aristotle’s Voice. 33 This call is not unlike the critique of consensus in collaborative learning that John Trimbur’s 1989 “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning” outlines. 89

and against a range of literal voices encompassed within any given space enacting critical folksonomic pedagogy.34 Collaborative work, folksonomically constructed through socially networked environments, highlights polyvocality. Folksonomic communities are built to inherently encourage a multiplicity of voices, but as I have argued, the potential for minority voices to be silenced exists. It is up to the revisionary rhetor to, as Jung also argues, “seek to disrupt their reader’s harmonious reading experiences by using textual strategies that delay immediate convergence of meaning—creating the potential for readers to confront the silenced voices inherent in textual construction” (p. 34). If the revisionary rhetor works alongside the community to delay meaning by continuing to draw attention to and encouraging the inclusion of the community’s minority voices, a solid praxis built from metadiscursive commentary that the community would normally ignore or forget might lead folksonomic communities toward a deeper understanding and attention toward intertextuality. Folksonomy as a Feminist Pedagogy Critically feminist folksonomic pedagogy is predicated on the idea that solely requiring individual student demonstration of clear, concise, and critical composition negates the great value inherent in the wise social network working in concert with the revisionary rhetor. Because, the community, the folk of any given living and learning space, can only engage with what it can critically perceive. It’s the job of the teacher to bring ideas to the community for negotiation—to enact a culture of convergence with respect to the vibrancy of the folk one interacts with. In order to critically enter in to the community construction of knowledge, the revisionary rhetor, while encouraging the community toward moments of disruption, must also highlight lack. As the community attempts to move toward wholeness, to see a project as “finished” or “complete,” the revisionary rhetor must continually pull lack from the edge of the community consciousness and place it at the center. Because, “becoming more whole means being willing to embrace what we would sooner not have to, the ‘lacks’ of our texts and our lives. It means being willing to resee the negativity of our experience in ways that transform our futures” (Jung 153). In essence, the folksonomic pedagogue would not only draw attention to the moments of lack

34 In fact due to its folk nature, “clarification” in its full, traditional sense might never be reached. 90

within the social network, in order to push the community toward a greater understanding of power, but would also encourage members of the community to take up this revisionary goal. And while it could be argued that individuals might not engage in the construction of multigenre texts (as figured by Jung) outside of educational situations, they will certainly experience community and will need a critical understanding of both the “delay of clarification” and “lack” in order to navigate these constructs. If pedagogues hope to challenge students in ways that critically transfer out of the individual classroom and into the community (a goal of critical and feminist pedagogies), we must be willing to rest in lack, to delay clarification, and to allow these things to happen in concert with community decisions and assemblages. Consequently, this conscious opposition to both monarchic and divinely decreed control inherent in the concept of nomos calls attention to the critical consciousness necessary on the part of the individual in concert with the group to fully enact a theory of folksonomy. So, the folk must not only be a community of individuals organized by common ideals and practices as they interact with one another, produce and purchase artifacts, and build or breakdown social networks with critical understanding of the hierarchical organization at work. They must understand, and participate in, an active resistance (a true return to the historical conception of nomos) to the laws and distribution of power enforced by hegemonic forces outside any group’s ken—forces still largely controlled by white men (Belcher; Curry; Delpit; hooks; Kutz and Roskelly).35 Of course, to work toward a more nuanced understanding of how specific hegemonic forces might be continually changed by concerted effort (nomos) on the part of everyday people (folk) leads to critical pedagogies framed by feminist theories of disruption and lack. I believe relying on the crowd through critically feminist folksonomic pedagogy can necessarily extend Jung’s conclusions. The collaborator must help the community highlight how individuals might add, or not, compelling difference to a composing that moves beyond singular student entities—ultimately providing a schema for how learners might “delay clarification” or experience “lack” as they work within, outside, and alongside critical folk experiences both in and out of the academy, both on and off the internet. In sum, for critical feminist pedagogues, folksonomy is:

35 I draw attention to white men, here, to demonstrate how these power structures might operate in American hegemonic systems. 91

1. A theory and practice of teaching writ broad, situated so that the explicit responsibility and primary control over information—as it is displayed, organized, revised, and used—rests with the community of students, so that they might significantly shape the landscape of the classroom based on their own knowledge and interests as a social network embedded in lived experience. 2. The role of the folksonomic pedagogue, then, would be to physically and mentally organize the crowd in such ways as to encourage diversity of opinion, through independence and decentralization, eventually becoming the primary collator for materials generated through, with, and by the learning group. 3. As primary collator, the instructor must enact a feminist attention toward disruption, through encouraging the delay of clarification and the exploration of lack, so that others might be encouraged toward an understanding of how gender, race, hegemony, and hierarchy might complicate the community’s use of information. 4. An active attention to how students might be encouraged to disrupt the nomoi of hegemonic, localized communities in which the community take part. 5. The use of uncertainty to educate the teacher, break down assumptions of knowledge in the classroom, and allow collaboration to cross the binary of teacher and learner in classroom spaces. Individually, feminist and critical theories do give attention toward race, gender, local democracy, and power sharing, yet both can be pushed toward a greater understanding of how wise crowds might work to build critically thinking individuals by a repositioning of the expert most readily seen in the scholarship on social networking. Consequently, critical feminist folksonomic pedagogy argues for a repositioning of power through an interrogation of the role of the teacher within learning spaces. Resources such as historical knowledge, foresight, critical thinking skills, in-depth understanding of the subject base, are all home to the academic and are needed in the classroom. The role of collater and problematizer is filled by the expert/teacher/academic that pursues information in a given field and studies critical theories that highlight different ways social interaction based on dynamic community construction might be aggregated for group use. If students focus on journaling as a primary way to interrogate the material of a course, the instructor might encourage students to research popular or famous journals and to then try to

incorporate both what is and is not understood as “successful” journaling, for example. Yet, this does not position the expert as the controlling force in relation to how information will be negotiated in the classroom. Rather, folksonomy asks experts to reposition and invest themselves in the belief that the community can be trusted to educate itself. Simple acts, like journaling, might be seen anew by both the students and the educator through an approach that asks for a combining and explicit negotiation of writing and learning. And while the move toward trusting the wise crowd has begun in digital environments that have encouraged folksonomic participation, current scholarship on folksonomy has largely failed to integrate discussions of uneven power structures, gender, and race, and the impact these issues might have on participation or construction of folksonomic environments in online or face-to-face spaces. Ultimately, I agree with Jung, when she claims, “The inclusion of metadiscursive commentary and intertextuality helps to breakdown the binary between process and product” (p. 175). With this “breakdown” comes the possibility for kairotic moments that may lead to change in the nomoi of the folk—it may lead to magic.

[A]dventurous “early adopters” and technophiles are discovering that adding wikis to their curriculum can be as painless as childbirth—and almost as life altering. –Matt Barton, “Is There a Wiki in This Class?” Chapter Four Wiki’d Up and Ready to Go: CFF Pedagogy, Attempted Introduction In the spring semester of 2008, I was awarded the opportunity to team-teach English 731 at Miami University. English 731 is a graduate seminar focused on composition and rhetoric pedagogy taught in the summer to incoming writing teachers. And while further on in the chapter I’ll describe what, exactly, happens in 731, suffice to say the course is commonly referred to as a “teacher training” class for the department. When planning the curriculum for the course with my fellow teachers, I thought, “Ah ha! Let’s try some critical feminist folksonomy (CFF).” My first spark of a thought, and the classroom activities and wiki that arose from it, are what I discuss in this chapter. I’ll first start with a general discussion of the types of curricula educators are encouraged, if not outright required, to implement here in Ohio. Next, I move to the pilot study of CFF a colleague and I tried out in the 731 space with the graduate students new to Miami. In my discussion of the results from that pilot study, I rely heavily on interviews conducted by a colleague who was not involved in the course. The chapter then concludes with a discussion of how the 731 course would need to still further change if true CFF pedagogy is to be enacted in ways that would more forcefully engage the intelligence of the crowd. Throughout the chapter, the reader will note comment boxes provided by one of the study participants. This student participant did not provide an interview, but rather agreed to work toward complicating the results from an insider/outsider perspective after the chapter was written. In the end, I hope that by communicating this blundering narrative through multiple voices to encourage others experimenting with new ideas and pedagogies to do the same—to try, to blunder, to share, and to learn. What It Might Mean to Center Students The new curricular guidelines from the State of Ohio measure most classroom interaction, it seems, from a standard of student-centeredness—encouraging activities like the “Socratic seminar,” where the instructor provides only additional questions, and “jigsaw,” where each

student group is responsible for a particular piece of an entire lesson (“English Model Curriculum”). Yet most of this language still positions the expert in the role of controller and de facto creator of these spaces—the educator plans, controls, and critiques student involvement and performance in all of these activities from the position of observer (“English Model Curriculum”). This type of instruction, where the teacher is positioned as an information architect and inventor, immediately places students in a consumptive role—it asks the educator to lead students in the invention of the university, instead of allowing students to invent their own ways with the educator. The opportunity for students to be innovative creators, to in fact lead, in predetermined student-centered spaces does not disappear, but certainly it diminishes. Consequently, the teacher, digital or not, still controls the space. So then, how is a critical, feminist folksonomic pedagogy any different? As the crowd attempts to negotiate new learning spaces, the instructor must bring ignored, forgotten, or unknown observations (whether the expertise originates from the instructor, the students, or outside forces) to the notice of the group and must use these observations to encourage diversity of opinion, independence, and decentralization (elements that encourage uncertainty and a questioning of first principles).36 And, perhaps unlike most enactments of critical pedagogy in the classroom, a critical folksonomic pedagogy always places the power of critical thinking and action in the hands of the community—not the “expert.” While the instructor may encourage the learning community to I didn’t recognize it at the time, but take up other opinions and ideas, the community in retrospect, it seems that many of the group activities in which we decides what it will and will not use. Therefore, were engaged (in ENG 731) almost student centered classrooms that rely on the instructor required this uncertainty. Working with the wikis—something that for course materials, such as texts and assignments, was new to many of us in the and, perhaps most particularly, the understanding of course—demanded a different orientation to learning. I often these texts through handouts, lecture notes, and guided found myself asking (myself or my assignments may not engage the community on a local, group members), “So, what are we supposed to do?” Or, “What are we inventive level. In other words, student-centeredness, supposed to write about?” That in its attempt to negotiate on the kairotic, folk level, phrase (‘supposed to”) is evidence of my desire to be certain. due to the control the folk group of academics exerts

36 Of course, one of the more difficult things the pedagogue must face is the possibility that the group may choose to reject her opinion. 96

over the crowd, might fail to destabilize, or produce any significant change to the nomoi of any particular group—instructor included. Let me be clear, student-centering as it is imagined at the programmatic level (at least at my institution) is impossible if the instructor, as the ruling-body of the classroom, still takes charge of deciding what is and is not produced, what is and is not important, and what is and is not enacted in the learning space. In other words, educators must provide students the opportunity to rhetorically shape learning environments so that uncertainty will have the opportunity to arise for both the instructor and the student. This uncertainty, then, can be used to foster kairotic critical thinking that unmasks what is often ignored in learning spaces—the nomoi that support bandwagon appeals and surface performance of “good student” / “good teacher” roles. Kairos, as discussed in the third chapter, defined by Susan Jarratt as the ability for the rhetor to “judge the circumstances at the moment of an oration,” can only be fully enacted by a rhetor who is fully immersed in the nomoi of the learning body, a member of the community, one of the folk. While this does not mean educators cannot have or enact kairos in the classroom, it certainly makes any attempts at kairos, even if respectfully accepted by the student community, suspect. For instructors who are not part of the communities they educate, even those enacting CFF pedagogy, this immersion is always inevitably contingent and incomplete. The teacher still institutionally has different modes of power, different available roles that can never be entirely overcome. In this chapter, I’ll relate an instance of a teaching group that instituted a digital folksonomic space in a course focused on the theories and practices of teaching composition. Through CFF pedagogy, my colleague and I, two of the three teachers tasked with educating new graduate students in the English department, tried to encourage students to take more ownership and control over the theories, ideas, and classroom practices with which they were being asked to engage in by the department. The folksonomic space was instituted through a combination of a classroom wiki, individual reading and writing, and group conversations. The wiki was chosen as the main site of collaboration because it is one of the main ways educators talk and enact social networking in the classroom; the wiki is supported and maintained by the university; and many of the new teachers would be able to access the wiki for courses they would be teaching and needed to be made aware of its existence as a pedagogical option. By enacting praxis focused on feminist disruption, we hoped graduate students new to teaching at Miami University would

more critically engage with the creation and change of their own nomoi regarding the teaching and practice of writing as educators and students—to challenge the gatekeeping of the nomoi of education they brought with them and would continue to experience in the academy. Wikis, Wise-Crowds, and Pilot Studies The pilot study referred to within this chapter worked to push beyond the “wise crowd” that I should preface this statement by graduate students so often embody in an effort to pay saying that my knowledge attention to what is left behind when wise groups make concerning crowd theory is very limited. However, because I don’t decisions. In other words, we attempted to rest in perceive myself as fitting into this uncertainty, pushing the learning space into a “wise crowd” when I first began this teacher training course, and “conclusion-less” place in order to enact feminist because I know several of my pedagogies that highlight lack and disruption. As colleagues who didn’t have any prior graduate school or teaching described in Chapter Three, scholars Julie Jung, bell experience often claimed they felt hooks, and Nancy Welch argue for pedagogical “lost” in all the composition theory, I’m not sure how many of strategies that call our reliance on hegemonic practices us felt “wise” at that point. into question, with the ultimate goal of forging more

Of course, though, there were equitable practices for both students and teachers. A those in our group who were graduate student wikispace designed to allow moments certain (or at least performed “certainty”) they had all the “right” of invention and disruption was an attempt to then answers and were always ready to merge these feminist practices with folksonomic ones. offer conclusions. Additionally, from my perspective, the I’d like to take a minute here to turn the reader’s pedagogical approaches of one of attention to the idea of a “wiki” as a folksonomic space the teachers in this course tended to favor certainty and may have and the ways in which writing educators have most encouraged a “wise crowd” recently been discussing/using wikis. Meg Ormiston’s environment in the classroom that necessitated disruption. Creating a Digital Rich Classroom, a text designed for k-12 instructors, highlights some of the basic ways wikis are frequently used by educators at all levels of education: “literature circles,” “research collaborations,” “question-and-answer sessions,” “problems of the day,” “character studies,” “peer editing,” “book talks,” and “pen pal collaborations” are all part of the many uses teachers find that work well with wikis (57). And a fabulous place to focus for an in-depth discussion of the implications of and studies completed in relation to wikis would be Robert Cummings and Matt Barton’s 2008 edited collection Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom. In the introduction to the collection,

Cummings argues that Wikipedia, as an online, openly edited encyclopedia, has forever changed the ways in which knowledge and power are imagined and negotiated (2). Cummings uses the introduction to trace the history of the wiki, to explain how Wikipedia, as the “vanguard” of wikis, eventually came to be seen as a trustworthy source of information, and to highlight how wikis are increasingly used in “mash-ups” of other computer related software and applications in everything from census materials to Mapquest (4-40). Throughout the collection, multiple authors argue that the main purpose of wikis is to encourage a communal authoring that resists hierarchy in a single written text (Stephanie Vie and Jennifer deWinter, David Elfving and Ericka Menchen-Trevino, and Matt Barton). Yet, perhaps most useful to this discussion is Barton’s own contribution in “Is There a Wiki in This Class?” In his essay, he argues, “Though there are certainly many legitimate ways one can go about introducing students to the concept of giving back to their community, I think wikis offer something very special—they combine public service with ‘shaping’ and being active members of that public” (193). It is this attitude, of shaping and being active members, that occasioned my interest in using a wiki to integrate CFF pedagogy in 731. Our classroom use would be like Barton’s when he argues for “flexibility, camaraderie, and civility,” yet unlike Barton, our purpose would not be to create a “successful” wiki—a plethora of materials organized around objectively voiced contributions with justifications embedded for charged commentary (180-185).37 Instead, we’d work to use the wiki as an open-ended questioning space—one that resisted closure, did not necessarily contain justifications, and that highlighted reader/writer gaps (not to fill, but to focus our thinking around). For the most part, I think this space was not as disruptive, nor as useful in that disruption, as it could have been for the new teachers. In the sense that, there was no student consensus regarding the usefulness of the wiki, perhaps exacerbated by our failure, as teachers, to fully make use of the wiki in a way that reached beyond common student-centering practices. The use of the wikispace was not as effective at helping students reimagine their roles in the classroom as we, the instructors, could have hoped. The integration of the wiki space failed to work disruptively for some students; authority was often re-inserted into some discussions/memories of working with the wiki; and not all students were willing to see the lack of concision and

37 For further wiki references, see chapters one and three, specifically Rich Rice’s work, as well as Chris Anson’s and Susan Miller Cochran’s. 99

clarity as an opportunity for more open communal invention. Despite these difficulties, the narrative I’ll share, through the IRB approved collection of student interviews, classroom practices, completed work, and the investigation of the online space itself, does show pockets of understanding the likes of which we, as the instigators of the study, wanted to encourage in students and from which we can build more concretely in the future. In addition, while this study could also be seen as working in opposition to the folksonomic undergraduate study I describe in my fifth chapter, my goal is to pay attention to, and potentially disrupt, ways in which different students have been “programmatically defined” over time, highlighting how we might disrupt their hegemonic identifications. Graduate students have been positioned as experts or as beginning to embody the role of the expert simply through their acceptance and integration into a graduate program. They are poised to function as a wise crowd; unlike undergraduates, who are often positioned as “less than.” Consequently the graduates (re)entering the university are quite a bit different than their undergraduate counterparts. Of course, a managed student-centeredness can become even more prevalent at the graduate level—where seminars form the backbone of the collegiate experience (see Chris Anson and Susan Miller I definitely agree with this statement, and I think this might be Cochran, 2009). While best practices urge teachers to why I wouldn’t characterize my create a place where students can try out new ideas and (and perhaps others’) participation in the teacher training course as many instructors encourage open conversation and embodying the “wise crowd.” An discussion of the materials in the course, at its core, undergraduate English/education major, I had participated in several graduate study is predicated on the practicum experiences in high apprenticeship/mentorship system. More so than at the school English classrooms, and I had completed a semester of undergraduate level, students are expected not only to student teaching the previous emulate teacher behavior, but to want to learn how this spring. But I was still hesitant in that teacher training course, and I emulation might best take place. Consequently, students remember being concerned about in graduate courses most likely have a greater how to act and what was expected of me now that I was a graduate understanding of the “disciplining” involved in the student. I wasn’t sure if I needed to discipline they have chosen to pursue than do their approach that classroom space differently than the teacher training undergraduate counterparts and at the same time may be course I took at the undergraduate more anxious about performing in socially acceptable level a year prior.

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ways—especially as many move into the teaching role for the first time at Miami University, their chosen school for graduate study. With an understanding of how both graduates and first-year undergraduates enter into the university similarly—in that they are both “new” groups who are unfamiliar with the terrain of the university as a whole and the English Department as a site of education—and differently—in that their goals and educational experiences have shaped them to expect to embody different roles—the qualitative research I had the pleasure to engage in with a community of writers works to open spaces tailored toward the empowerment of the multi-faceted discourse communities making up college classrooms. As the reader will note, while the graduate study in this chapter and the undergraduate study in chapter five share the theoretical underpinnings of feminist disruption, wise crowd theory, and folksonomic theory, they also represent critical folksonomy enacted in very different ways, conducted in very different circumstances, with very different goals. Yet, they also have the same overarching goal—to enable a new community to enter into the discourses of a field in ways which might significantly impact the way they approach power relations, and the shaping of nomoi in future learning experiences. In this chapter, I’ll first explain the impetus behind the addition of this particular folksonomic space into a graduate course’s curriculum. Second, I’ll give the classroom conventions for this particular set of courses before outlining the qualitative study I conducted in order to investigate the effectiveness of the folksonomic instruction happening within the graduate course. Third, I’ll highlight the results of the data collected by this study before closing with brief suggestions regarding the future implementation of such a space within a graduate course. The reader will notice that as I focus on the results of the classroom study conducted in relation to disruptive folksonomic work, I reproduce large sections of the interviews conducted in relation to the study. I do this in order to try and be as open and transparent in my interpretation as possible. With this chapter, I hope to encourage conversation from differing viewpoints in relation to folksonomic work, a conversation that is inventive, ongoing, and interstitial—one that resists closure and is open to failure, disruption, and fragmentary change. Folksonomic Pedagogies in the College Classroom One of the most difficult (and paradoxical) things to do with folksonomic pedagogy is start. Although the community will decide how and what information will be useful in the pursuit of their academic goals, allowing space for the community to do that requires course design that

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is flexible and yet highly specific. Instructors must aggregate a large amount of information from many disparate sources and then must organize this information in as many comprehensive ways as possible, so that community members might enter into conversation with it from several different perspectives. An example of this type of aggregation might make use of Google Alerts, to notify the user when a particular term, or group of terms, is used by the media, a blog to organize this information, tags to help cross-reference the materials, and a tag-cloud to check for the popularity of certain uses. Unlike the standard creation of a syllabus—where students are asked to purchase/read certain texts that the educator has culled from a large body of information, aggregation would attempt to make as much material available to students as was digitally and physically possible.38 Of course, this aggregation on some fronts might be for naught, as the community might choose to gather their own information, or to pursue a direction the instructor has not considered. And unlike the undergraduate study that sought to find ways in which students might act as the wise crowd in ways beneficial to the students and the instructor, this CFF graduate study would focus on ways to interrupt classroom practices that slid too easily toward resolution. In other words, while the undergraduate class works to implement crowd theory in order to empower students’ senses of collegial possibility and power, the graduate study works to disrupt completion and clarification narratives in which graduate students are likely to be well-versed. Of course, with any implementation, there is also the chance that the community will not be successful—in fact, educators should count on students having difficulty operating as a “wise” crowd, especially since “trusting” the crowd runs so anathema to most of the academic study students engage in before reaching the graduate level. Yet as research has shown, crowds that solve problems best are crowds that are not only personally invested in the answers to the questions being asked but are also versed in the types of answers most likely to yield the desired results (MIT). Consequently, a graduate student crowd with members from creative writing, literature, and composition and rhetoric at the Master’s and PhD level represent an almost too perfect example of the types of crowds most likely to yield better results when working together on issues of practice and theory in English studies than when working apart. Of course, as

38 What I am suggesting here is not overnight or summertime work, it would require the instructor to put careful time and effort into the establishment and upkeep of a sizable resources pool. On the other hand, as academics, this is the type of work we do all the time. CFF just asks that we do this openly in concert with students. 102

teachers, we must also ask ourselves if the “right” answers (as defined in Chapters Two and Three) are the best answers to the questions we ask students. If we fall into the revisionary trap explained by bell hooks, Nancy Welch, and Julie Jung, perhaps asking the crowd for a “smarter” answer would be all we as educators could hope for in socially-networked spaces. And, in fact, most graduate courses, with aggregation completed by not only the teacher but by all members of the classroom, have the opportunity to function as perfect wise-crowds. Yet, with uncertainty and the embracing of lack as two of a folksonomic pedagogue’s primary goals, the work, contradictions, and, perhaps, fallacies present in a socially- networked space, “wise” or not, would present the richest opportunities for discussion and disruption of the “business as usual” classroom, as it would provide the greatest pool of potential information to draw from, and may provide opportunities to highlight how crowd members might actually shift their thinking in relationship to the presented materials and ideas. Together, students and teachers might stumble upon ways to significantly impact the nomoi, while continuing to critically think, (inter)act, and write. In other words, while graduate students might be perfectly poised to represent a “wise crowd” working toward greater resources, does working as such really provide the most fruitful opportunities for the acknowledgement of difference and the realization of change? Does operating as a “wise crowd” really embody the best work we might hope future college educators and researchers to engage in? Or, are students simply performing the role of “good student,” and, in effect, invoking the tyranny of the majority, while papering over the fissures and contradictions in their roles as teachers, learners, and fallible humans? In order to test these theories, with the help of my fellow teachers, I implemented a wiki space in an introductory teacher space, gathered post-class reflections, and had a colleague conduct interviews in order to determine if graduate teaching assistants—most heading into college classrooms for the first time—would feel a greater sense of agency, a greater investigation of their communal nomoi as both teachers and students, if folksonomic space was implemented in a graduate, teacher assistant training course.39 The Community

39 Throughout the chapter, I will refer to the instructors in first person, and the students who so graciously agreed to participate in the study will be referred to pseudonymously. I do this in order to level the playing field amongst study participants and to protect the identities of the new graduate students—many of whom are very vulnerably entering into graduate school for the first time. 103

At Miami University, all incoming English graduate students who hold teaching assistantships through the English Department are required to take a sequence of three courses that begin three weeks before the start of their first semester teaching at Miami University (all but one or two graduate students who are accepted to Miami’s English Department every year fall into this same category). Whether the graduate students have taught or not, all must take the three sequence course once. At the time of the study (in the summer of 2009), the three courses were numbered English 731, 698, and 699. All of the courses were co-taught by the current director (Jim) and two assistant directors (Bre and I) of the first year writing program. English 731, or The Theory and Practice of Teaching Composition,40 is a compacted graduate seminar on teaching that is taught over the course of three weeks in the summer. The course runs Monday through Friday, from 9:00 am to 12:00 pm, with afternoon sessions planned regarding special topics (for example, a meet and greet with the current head of Graduate Studies for the English Department). Within the course, students are given practical assistance (such as the location of their offices, affordances of on-campus libraries, and university policies) and pedagogical information (the standard curricula for the courses they will be teaching). Incoming teachers are introduced to and complete assignments with the Teacher’s Guide (a collaborative document of best classroom practices with an over twenty year history that is developed by teacher assistants and faculty every year), get a crash course in basic rhetorical terms, read the standard texts for College Composition (labeled ENG 111), and are asked to develop their course policies, syllabi, and curricular calendars for the next academic semester. Needless to say, it’s a lot of work in a very short period of time. It’s no wonder, many of the students in 731 feel overwhelmed with the amount of information they are introduced to from the fields of Composition and Rhetoric. Exacerbating feelings of displacement and disorientation, at least half of the students are brand new to Composition and Rhetoric as a discipline. Not to mention, most new students/teachers are completely new to Oxford, if not Ohio itself, and often feel relocated in this way as well. At the same time that difficulties associated with new places, spaces, and ideas crop up, 731 is also a ripe space for the creation of strong community bonds. As one participant claims, “Because [731] was so intense and met for so long each day, I think we all felt like we were in the same boat. Most of us were new to Oxford and everything and I think it really created a

40 The course descriptions for 731, 698, and 699 are appended. 104

strong bond with all of the incoming TAs which is really helpful as far as hanging out and people to freak out with” (Robert). Because of the intense nature of the course, many students gravitate toward one another in order to share the burden of such a shifting space—where students are expected to become teachers through a more open and negotiated studentship. Throughout the sequence of courses, students can be found talking with one another before and after class, going out together to relax after hours, and some even share living spaces with one another. In other words, in a very real sense, 731 is the jumping off point for many of the community bonds these students will return to again and again as they progress through their work in graduate education at Miami (and perhaps beyond, as many continue to work in education). 731 is followed in the fall semester by ENG 698, or A Workshop in the Teaching of Writing—a two unit, fifty minute, once a week course meant to continue to help the new teachers as they navigate grading, run into problematic or positive student interactions, develop more personal and theoretically backed curricula, and begin to plan the courses they will teach in the spring semester (labeled as ENG 112). The new teachers are expected to write short reflections on their teaching; read additional practical and theoretical pieces based on rhetoric and composition pedagogy given to them during the course of 698; provide a short presentation of a sequence of teaching materials near the end of the course to their peers that they plan on implementing in the Spring semester in English 112; and undergo a formal observation of their 111 course by a member of the teaching team. While new instructors teach ENG 112, Literature and Composition, they are enrolled in the last course in the series, ENG 699. English 699 continues to further develop the ideas introduced to the teachers/students in ENG 731 and 698, and asks the instructors to begin to reflect on the type of teacher they have been as the year has progressed—what they might want to work on, what was (un)successful, and how they might continue to incorporate new theories and ideas into the standard, core curricula with which all instructors engage during their time at Miami. The students of 699 are also expected to continue to read essays, watch videos, listen to audio work, and develop activities and materials for the courses they are teaching. And again, all students/teachers are formally observed by a member of the 699 teaching team. At the end of the teaching year, the new teachers are also given a formal evaluation that charts their participation in class, development of teaching materials, and course observations throughout the year.

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From the summer of 2009 to the Spring of 2010, Jim, Bre, and I taught the series of three courses making up the T.A. training provided by the English Department for the new graduate student teachers of English 111 and 112. And after the completion of the tightly compacted English 731 and the more lengthy English 698 and 699, all participants should have left with an understanding of not only what Miami University expects students to achieve in College Composition, English 111, and College Composition & Literature, English 112, but how to teach those courses from a pedagogically and theoretically solid foundation built from current best practices. Further complicating the course sequence, Miami recently decided that all English 111 and 112 courses would be taught in laptop classrooms with a focus on how digital media and alphabetic writing intersect in at least one of the major assignments of the course. A tall order, to say the least, for all of us. Prior to co-teaching English 731 (Theory and Practice of Teaching Composition), 698 and 699 (both titled Workshop in the Teaching of Writing), Bre and I conducted two qualitative research studies. One, conducted with Ann Updike, focused on teacher training at Miami, and another study with Jason Palmeri looked at how informal teacher networks informed classroom practice at Miami (CCCC 2009; C&W 20009). These informal networks were as varied as emails received and sent to colleagues both within and outside of the university, blogs in cooking, technology, family visited by new teachers, and conversations in the halls of the university with teachers from varied disciplines. And for both studies, the teaching assistants provided us with records of their teaching philosophies, teaching stories, cognitive maps focused on the uses of technology, first year syllabi, and their ideas about teaching in and around the different spaces of Miami as they also worked toward receiving doctoral degrees in English (CCCC 2009; C&W 2009). Both studies, using archival research and interviewing several past and current teaching assistants, examined the ways teaching assistant teacher identity was constructed at Miami. The results of this work were what Bre and I hoped to counteract through the integration of a folksonomic space in 731—many of the teaching assistants reported feeling disconnected from the materials they were required to teach without connection to more informal teacher networks (CCCC 2009; C&W 2009). Because information regarding Miami’s writing curricula was communicated to them so quickly in coursework or over listservs, amongst many other changes going on in their lives, they struggled to make sense of the new materials in relation to their own

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ideas about education, and their prior experiences teaching and learning before entering our graduate program (CCCC 2009; C&W 2009). Many struggled to integrate what they had learned in the 731, 698, and 699 course sequence with actual classroom practice. Several times we were told that the theoretical information they were given in the course didn’t seem to have a grounding that would provide a firm enough foundation for them to comfortably integrate that information without the more informal support networks they relied upon (CCCC 2009; C&W 2009). Few felt they understood or could name the theories influencing the focal assignments of English 111 at the close of 731, despite concentrated effort on the part of all of the instructors of 731 to make explicit connections between composition theory, Miami Plan language, and classroom practice. Some of this disconnect was present in teaching philosophies and syllabi (both documents are usually developed in these beginning teaching classes).

Figure Seven: A screen capture of the front page of the wikispace Consequently, Bre and I hoped that by asking the new cohort of teachers to help one another interact in a wiki site, some of the tension felt by new teachers between the materials from the department and their own beliefs about what was important in a writing classroom might be turned toward productive spaces we openly addressed together. We hoped new teachers, with the room to work through their own insights in a valued web-based community space, might be better encouraged to both develop and sustain solid pedagogical practices that

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would help them achieve classroom balance during their first year as teachers. We wanted to bring the “water-cooler” talk into the classroom—to create an interstitial space that fostered group interaction, problem-solving, and resource building, where every member might be able to contribute as much or as little as they felt comfortable without the burden of their name attached to the, often partially, finished or conflicting materials. Ultimately, we wanted to encourage the students within the graduate space to move past the desire to work as the “wise crowd” they might feel expected to perform and toward feminist disruption, in order to foster uncertainty that could work toward radical change. Folksonomy in a Graduate Course In preparation of the three course series, the teaching team conducted extensive research in the fields of Composition and Rhetoric, as we worked to compile a large store of resources— including academic essays, best teaching practices, and technology applications. We then made these resources available to the students enrolled in 731, 698, and 699 through books, printouts, a wikispace, Blackboard page, and a website. At times, information on practices and applications were simply given to students in an alphabetic format and then briefly discussed during course time. Most often, students were asked to try out the bits and pieces of theory they were exposed to over the arc of the three weeks and two semesters we all had together. As stated in the study rational, Bre and I wanted to introduce more folksonomic ways of gathering material throughout the course to encourage teacher participation and ownership over ideas, materials, theories, and practices. We also felt the need to start fairly simply, as we did not wish to pressure, overwhelm, or alienate a body of people already under a significant amount of stress and work. Consequently, during course planning before the 731, 698, and 699 course sequence began, we planned to incorporate folksonomic practices during the course. And, I believe, in the following exercise was our first mistake. Students were often given in class time to complete the following set of exercises: 1. Choose a resource. Pick out the key points of the text and relate them to classroom practice 2. Meet in a group of three to four and have each member act out the following roles during the course of your discussion: recorder, listener, speaker, questioner 3. Place all of your findings on the wiki space in real time, during the discussion, without edits, even if the information you find is contradictory or repeats a previous recorder 4. Read other group interpretations of the texts in comparison with your own

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5. Participate in large group discussion of similarities and discrepancies of the different findings 6. Individually write a short, reflective essay taking classroom discussions into account For example, we asked the teachers to complete readings on writing and place (such as Lynn A. Staeheli’s Place)—as “space and place” was the chosen theme for English 111 and 112 at the time of the course. Next, we asked them to examine/think about places within their new community. After they worked alone, we then asked them compile the definitions and ideas into the wiki (without editing) in small groups. Finally, the small groups were to share their conflicting or differing viewpoints with one another, before they had time to personally reflect on their own desires for the courses they would be teaching. Below, I’ve grouped the differing definitions that the students came up with regarding space and place to give the reader a sense of the work completed on the wiki. Place: 1. “A man-made physical structure or natural landscape.” 2. “Place is a public area identified by physical locations, landmarks, geographical features, etc.” 3. “We describe place with common vocabulary (‘north of,’ ‘20 minutes from,’ etc.) and choose what we describe through what we perceive others’ expectations to be.” 4. “Determines perception of others within place or self, has culture, defined space, more concrete interchangeable based on context.” Space: 1. “That which your former significant other told you they need.” 2. “A mental sanctuary from oppression.” 3. “That which has the capacity to be filled. Space is a personal area defined by experiences, memories, social interactions, etc.” 4. “Undefined location? ‘Personal Space?’ Abstract?” And the group that eschewed two separate definitions for one inclusive definition: “The concept of home is imagined space. People are who define where we call home, rather than the actual place. Birth place becomes a trivial fact rather than a place we identify our ‘home.’ However, geographical location does factor into how we choose to identify our origins and our roots, in terms of community and its mores.”

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The space and place discussion regarding definitions was filled with many differing viewpoints, laughter, consternation and pontificating. Altogether, the different definitions gave a collaborative picture of the differing opinions, definitions, and approaches to place and space that all of the teachers were able to draw on as they moved forward with the curricula. From tongue-in-cheek definitions based on the significant others some of the new graduate students had left behind, to the psychoanalytic space defined by impression, and through the rejection of separate categories all together. This time to think, reflect, write, and combine that explicitly focuses on the teachers’ own perceptions of self in relation to the new curricula was infused throughout the work done on the wikispace during the semester. We allowed time in the course for instructors to work with one another toward building a community understanding of many of the key concepts of writing and rhetoric pedagogy in the course. During all of these sessions, Bre and I worked as facilitators and collators. We encouraged the inclusion of disparate opinions based on discussions/experiences of gender, race, and power; called attention to the absence of some of these ideas in the materials offered up by the groups; and we made sure that all members of the group were equally heard during the discussion time, regardless as to whether or not the group “agreed” with the varying opinions From my perspective, this goal provided by their peers. As a reader, do you see was achieved in our classroom—at anything familiar? The above exercise sounds a lot like least I saw how the activities Aurora and Bre facilitated forced “standard group work + wiki + shake well = us to think differently. However, as folksonomy” doesn’t it—complete with a hierarchical a first-year instructor, I did not feel equipped (or confident enough) to list of activities? Now, the wiki did problematize single- implement folksonomic spaces in authorship, stable definition building, and hierarchical my classroom; I didn’t think I had enough experience to attempt this contributions, as well as allowed the students to type of approach. (I was already participate in the crowd in a folksonomic space. worried about my students finding out I was a new teacher and only However, in the implementation of CFF pedagogy we sort of new what I was doing.) relied too heavily on moments of auditory intervention to disrupt more common “student centered” practices that many of the graduate students had already frequently engaged in. Yet be that as it may, more than any other persona we tried to embody, Bre and I focused on providing an open space that challenged easy or direct answers. When we worked with place and space, some of the teachers wanted us to provide them with a clear, departmentally approved

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definition.41 Bre and I actively worked against this—instead, we asked the instructors to try and position themselves amongst their peers, the readings, and their own experiences. We focused on the ways the different definitions provided by the smaller groups highlighted many different perspectives and meanings associated with words used in general conversation; discussed with students the things they, or we, did not see represented in some of the shared definitions; and also posed questions regarding what, then, these definitions made (un)available if they were incorporated into a different classroom space, with individuals being introduced to college for the first time. Our comments did not openly praise any one contribution; our goal was not to create coherence, or monolithic definitions of space and place that all teachers would adhere to. Rather, we wished to implement a folksonomic space, and in effect share with new teachers how helpful these spaces could be, and then to disrupt the closure that generally comes from relating many different viewpoints in course discussion by letting these ideas rest in conflict with one another. Bre and I tried to be careful to not explicitly direct the discussions of the small, self-formed groups, spending most of our time attempting to listen rhetorically and provide each group equal time to explain their own findings to the larger collective. Many times, these discussions led to open contestation on several points of the assigned reading materials, exercises in policy creation, and the practical applications of the work by many of the students. Rarely were any conclusions reached during, or after, the activities. Bre and I also refrained from “wrapping up” these sections of discussion time and would frequently move directly into the next section of the course after allowing students a few minutes to pause and reflect on the work with which we had all engaged. Bre and I, with our interactions with the students, tried to encourage participants to stay in the inventive space, attempting to push the envelope of uncertainty wider and the desire for product, synthesis, or conclusion farther away. At the close of 731, a colleague uninvolved with the course collected IRB approved permission forms. These forms asked 731 participants for permission to share the materials they had compiled on the wiki as well as their short essays reflecting on the course materials in order to better understand how such resources might be integrated into the 731 space in the future. Potential participants were also asked to provide (if they so chose) permission for our colleague

41 The department did not have a singular definition of place or space, but many, including those from activist, cultural, and personal narrative perspectives, in order to encourage critical thinking and diversity of opinion throughout the department and student body. 111

to contact them at a later date for a face-to-face interview regarding their involvement with the course. Interviews of the study participants were conducted by our colleague and involved questions surrounding the graduate students’ experiences with ENG 731 in general and specifically regarding their experiences with the wiki as a folksonomic classroom space. Notional interview questions were designed by me prior to the interviews of the study participants. Out of 22 potential participants, all agreed to allow access to their materials and most students agreed to be interviewed. A random set of interviewees were then chosen by our colleague conducting the interviews. Interviews were conducted at a time and place convenient to the student and no results were shared with me until the full series of courses that I was co-teaching (731, 698, and 699) were completed—to avoid any compulsory participation on the part of the students in fear of damaging their good standing as graduate students or instructors. All of the procedures for the study were IRB approved. Lastly, before getting to the results, it’s important to discuss the technical affordances of the particular wikispace used during the course of the study. The wikispace is maintained by Miami University and while open to the entire university, it is used and “belongs” to the English Department. Consequently, the wiki is both a protected and public space, as anyone from the university can view it, but those outside the university cannot.

Figure Eight: A screen capture of the front page of the 731 wikispace

Also, the Composition wiki does not log user ids, making it difficult for users to find exact contributions. And, the wiki does not allow for more than one user to make real time changes on a particular page at the same time. Consequently, if more than one user is working on a particular

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page, their contributions may be overwritten or lost due to work another user is doing in the same space. Results of the Study In looking over the study results, I identified three major attitudinal trends throughout the respondents’ answers that best represent the findings of the study as a whole, especially in regards to the use of different technologies in the 731 space, and specifically the wiki as a folksonomic space meant to generate uncertainty: disruption of authorial control, further wiki use in respondents own teaching, and community validation. Throughout the rest of this chapter, and the sharing of the 731 study findings, I will highlight individual moments the respondents experienced during the course of the study in order to present a complex crowd working through very integrated communal materials. In order to give the reader several different snapshots of the very disparate ways students both understood the wiki functioning within the class and how they then used that knowledge to navigate in their own teaching and learning practices, I will focus on three observable findings, specific to the ways in which we integrated the wikispace in the 731. These three findings provide examples and explain three larger attitudinal approaches to folksonomic work in the graduate course. Finding 1: When asked, the graduate students struggled to locate the contributions they, or their groups, made to the 731 wikispace. To begin each interview, the interviewer (who I’ll call Charlotte at her behest) asked the interviewees to point to which pages on the wiki they had actually contributed. The graduate student teachers were asked to pinpoint the work they had a part in creating on the wiki, in order to help the interviewer shape specific questions regarding their participation and to serve as a baseline reminder for the types of activities the students did on and with the wiki. Both Charlotte and I were then surprised to note that, collectively, the interviewees were largely unable to point to more than one or two sections they had specifically helped in producing. This very simple question turned out to be a not so simple pedagogical fold within the research of the 731 wikispace. On the part of the interviewees, the search for contributions often caused laughter, very mild embarrassment, or consternation, as Charlotte sat next to them in silence and the interviewees surfed through the different pages and contributions to the folksonomic webspace. One interviewee, Robert, exemplifies the difficulties most of the candidates had when looking for their materials and also highlights how these difficulties may indicate a larger finding

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within the study. For the most part, interviewees were happy to begin with the seemingly simple task Charlotte set before them—find what you did—but the task quickly became more difficult than many of the interviewees anticipated. Charlotte: Why don’t we start talking about the wiki, then? So if you could just point me to the contributions that you made on the wiki and then just maybe, kind of, talk about the process of how you came up with that stuff. Robert: Ok, sure. Um, let me find one [page of the wiki] I definitely contributed to [long pause], [whispers] maybe not [laughter]. The prompt was [pause] the main question they were posing was to write a technology policy for your syllabus. Here, the reader can see Robert struggle to find his own contributions. If the reader were to listen to his tone on the interview tape, they would hear that Robert’s inflection changes from the highly confident, strong answer of, “Ok. Sure,” to the whispered, “Maybe not,” followed by laughter. These changes might simply indicate that he feels chagrined at his inability to perform what he thought was a very simple task. Yet, when he can’t definitely find where and to what he contributed, he reverts to explaining the discussion starter he does see as he clicks through the different pages. So while his desire to perform “well” for the interviewer probably causes some of his embarrassment, Robert’s inability to articulate his direct involvement on the wiki speaks to the unsettling that can occur through the simple inclusion of a truly crowd-ruled collaborative moment in the writing classroom. Luke reacted similarly to Robert in the way he spoke about his own additions to the wikispace with the interviewer. Like Robert, Luke seems to be a little baffled by his inability to locate his own contributions. Unlike Robert, Luke is able to locate one of the pages he specifically contributed to, but unable to tell where he stops and his groupmates begin. After Charlotte asks Luke to locate his contributions, he states, “They were typing what we were kind of saying. I don’t remember if I typed that or not. But, because we were just typing whatever people were saying… [W]e had somebody kind of drafting something and then going back and looking at it. We were just kind of coming up with some key ideas and phrases.” Like Robert, Luke moves from trying to pinpoint his own contributions to again explaining what the activity surrounding the wiki work was about. Luke uses “we” again and again, suggesting that no matter who was typing, or how the typing was taking place, that he saw himself as part of a collective mind as it attempted to negotiate different “key ideas and phrases.” More than just a moment that

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logging user ids would highlight, Luke suggests, in a very different way than Robert, that his idea of authorship was disrupted by the way the wiki activities were conducted. If I’m playing “The Doubting Game”42 about the project, I could argue that Robert’s and Luke’s, as well as the other interviewees, momentary lapses in recall were due to several different factors that do not point to the disruption of the single-author that can occur through folksonomic spaces: Robert may have been very nervous with the interviewer and was afraid to take up too much of her time; the layout of the wiki (largely text based) maybe have been difficult for Luke to navigate; because they had not visited the wiki in a while both men may have simply forgotten about it; or Robert and Luke simply may not have found the wiki very memorable or useful (something I’ll discuss later on in the chapter). Yet, Robert’s inability to recall what he had individually contributed clearly bothers him as the interview continues. Later on in his interview, when the conversation again turned toward the wikispace and whether it was or was not helpful to the group of teachers in 731 during and/or after the course, Robert returned to the fact that he couldn’t remember where his individual contributions were located. His comments regarding the lapse clearly indicate that he sees his inability to locate his additions as either a shortcoming of the space or the activities he engaged in during the duration of the course. Charlotte: “Do you think your learning and writing could have benefitted more, especially in relation to the online spaces, if maybe they were used in a different way?” Robert: “I thought the Blackboard papers and discussion boards were managed pretty effectively. I thought there was a lot of good conversation that got started there. So, I have no complaints about [Blackboard]. The wiki exercises, I guess they were useful, but the process felt maybe a little rushed. I felt like [the wiki] was more for the sake of the conversations. I mean, it’s nice to be able to refer back to it—what we jotted down—but I can’t even remember which group was mine, so obviously there’s some sort of disconnect there. So the conversation was good, and I certainly remember the ideas that came up and everything, but I think the wiki was just sort of secondary [pause] maybe.”

42 For over a decade, the “Doubting Game” and the “Believing Game” have long been popularized in writing circles, since Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers in 1973. The “Doubting Game” and the “Believing Game” provoke new ways of seeing and knowing what we initially approach in our own thinking and writing and the thinking and writing of others as false or true. 115

In the above quotation, Robert presents an interesting conundrum. On the one hand, he argues the wiki felt “rushed” and repeats this idea through his use of the word “jotted.” Yet, when describing why Blackboard was effective and the wiki was ineffective, the only real difference between the two descriptions to the negative is his inability to recall what’s “his.” In fact, he only argues Blackboard was “managed effectively” and presents as evidence “a lot of good conversation [got] started there.” Yet the wiki, while also providing “good conversation,” included “ideas” he remembers. So, even though he may believe the wiki was managed less effectively, it also represents a generative space of ideas. The possessive pronoun is also certainly interesting, as he does not use it anywhere in his interview when referring to the Blackboard posts (perhaps because these are clearly labeled and he does not worry about his contributions getting mixed in with other users). Regardless, Robert is not alone in his discomfort with his recall abilities regarding the wiki. After the course series was over, and Charlotte and I were able to exchange information about the study, she also indicated to me on several occasions that she wasn’t sure how accurate the interviewees actually were when they did claim a site addition as their own. Charlotte cautioned me to be careful when I was analyzing the wikispace, as she worried the inability of participants to note their own contributions might skew the data I was collecting. And while Robert may see this recall as a “disconnect,” if I’m playing the “Believing Game,” in effect it may also point to a strength with Miami’s wiki, as it opens the envelope of invention to create a larger group space that does not have the clearer boundaries of “mine” present in other digital spaces—such as discussion boards, where contributions are clearly labeled through signatures, avatars, and usernames. And, as chapter three discusses, resting in the “disconnect” can be a productive, if uncomfortable, space for learners, as easy answers do not necessarily challenge teachers and students as much as those places where we falter, pause, collect, and reflect. Yet Robert also reminds me of the importance of active reflection. When a student/teacher does experience an instantiation of disconnect, it behooves the individual, and those with which the individual works, to provide time and space for reflection. Finding 2: Students decided for or against wiki use in their own classrooms to help foster student interactions and learning based on their own experiences and desires as students in 731.

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As we planned out the potential uses of the wikispace before 731 commenced, Bre and I hoped using the wiki would also encourage teachers to embrace newness in their own classrooms. We knew, from our own experiences in 731 and through the different mentorship positions we had both held on Miami’s Oxford campus in the past, most students would be unfamiliar with many of the technologies generously available to them in their new positions at Miami. One side benefit of introducing a different type of inventive space that enabled the harnessing of the crowd in our own classroom would also serve to encourage the teachers we were training to consider implementing similar work in the courses they would soon teach as new graduate instructors of English composition at Miami. A second side benefit of using the wikispace in the 731 space would be introducing the graduate students to resources they could use for their own scholarship both within and without the classrooms they taught in while learning at Miami. As I stated earlier, the new teachers were required to teach at least one major project focusing on the ways technology influenced the ways writing takes place—the wiki functions as one such space. And, in fact, all of the students who were interviewed—and many who were not—said that they were considering, or were already implementing wiki’d discussion groups or invention activities in the courses they taught. Their reasons behind using the wiki (or not) though, differ greatly from one to the next. Some of the 731 students closely related the folksonomic work of the wikispace to language highlighting interactive, public moments of communication. Later on in his interview, Robert, perhaps the most skeptical user of the wikispace that Charlotte interviewed, was again asked what he thought of the wiki in relation to teaching and whether or not he would be using any of the activities in the class he was teaching. Charlotte: “Do you or would you incorporate the wiki into your own teaching?” Robert: “I haven’t yet. I’ve been thinking about it, because they’re going to get to the public discourse soon and it’s especially… I want to try some digital things. I’ve been thinking about what to use. I haven’t really decided on anything yet, but it’s an option.” As a researcher, I used an interviewer un-involved with the course (Charlotte) in an attempt to foster more egalitarian responses on the part of interviewees (in this case, Robert). If I had been doing the interview, I would have asked Robert to finish that “it’s especially” portion of his sentence before moving on to my next question. Public Discourse refers to the third major assignment given to students in English 111—an assignment focused on entering public debate

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through writing—but what else was Robert trying to say? The wiki and public discourse are especially something? Discourse is especially suited to the wiki work he’s familiar with? Discourse is especially suited to something? What? But whatever additional questions I would have loved to ask, one thing is clear, Robert does relate wiki use to the major assignment in the course that highlights how students might enter into public debate through rhetorical discourse. Perhaps if we look at how Robert talks about the wiki and the Blackboard Discussion Boards throughout the rest of his interview, we might be able to glean more information about his intuitive ideas. Very early on in his interview, Robert mentions the course (731) as a whole changed the ways in which he thought about collaboration and writing, and more specifically, how the digital age factors into that praxis. After Charlotte asked Robert, “What would you say you learned about technology specifically, or teaching practices?” He speaks at length about how 731, and in a broader sense Miami faculty as a whole, introduced him to digital pedagogies that foster invention. Well, I guess I just never really thought about using computers to the extent that they are used to teach writing. Especially the extent which they are used [at Miami]. It seems like a lot of faculty [at Miami] are big on the whole digital approach to writing. We did some exercises in [731] on blogs and things like that and the one thing I am doing a lot in class is using the Blackboard discussion session to get the conversation going. And that’s really helpful because you get people responding to each other’s ideas and I think that’s great. So, I learned a bunch of ways to get [the] exchange of ideas flowing easily with computers and that’s probably the most [pause]. I mean, regardless of what device [the wikispace, Blackboard, or blogs] you decide to use, I think that’s the important thing, right? (Robert) Early on in this quotation of Robert’s interview, he argues that the most important lesson he took away from the digital instruction he received in 731 regarding digital pedagogy is in relation to the ways in which “computers” help “to get [the] exchange of ideas flowing easily.” These ideas fall in line with his later comments, where, using different words, he again argues that he sees Blackboard as a really productive way to “get the conversation going” in order to get “people responding to each other’s ideas.” As a whole, Robert is very positive about using digital technologies in the classroom throughout his interview—positivity he equates to Miami faculty

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he met, readings he completed, and demonstrations he participated in throughout his time in the 731, 698, and 699 sequence of courses. And in the long run, he argues that “regardless of device,” the “exchange of ideas” is the most important aspect of the inclusion of any technology in the classroom. I think this active comparison of Yet, I also want to suggest that some of Robert’s learning styles, as well as the technologies that facilitate certain own ideas about what types of “exchange” should be types of learning, could be helpful going on in a classroom space unnecessarily place the when encouraging new instructors to consider implementing invention capabilities of the wiki in a negative light. folksonomic pedagogies. For Specifically, I believe the ways in which Robert instance, I wish I had learned more then, in 731, about what continually uses language that reinforces the desire to folksonomic pedagogy “looks like,” promote concretized, controlled space in relation to what it entails, what it requires of students/of me. I think it was the exchange of ideas or placement of information difficult to try to learn two things at harkens back to his discussion of Blackboard’s once—a new technology (the wiki) and a new approach to teaching “discussion board.” Through his comments, it seems composition and rhetoric as if Robert desires the “organization” Blackboard (folksonomic pedagogy)—and, as someone who didn’t ultimately provides its users. In particular, I want to recall the incorporate wikis in my own reader’s attention to Robert’s earlier comments about instruction, I think that if I had been able to better explain to myself the how well Blackboard was “managed” in relation to pedagogical benefits of doing so, I the following piece of interview, where Charlotte may have been less hesitant about trying out such an unfamiliar again asks Robert to provide more information approach with my students. regarding his thoughts on the wiki use in 731. Charlotte: So, you would have liked to see [the wikispace] incorporated more fully into the [731] course? Robert: Um. I mean, maybe. I’m really not sure. I don’t think it was an effective exercise. But maybe if the wiki had been treated a little more, as a more formal space to put some [pause]. Well, not formal. To put a more coherent idea down then, it’d be more worth referring back to it, if that makes sense.” Consequently, Robert’s comments here reveal that he probably would be more likely to use the wikispace in his own classroom (although later comments suggest he still remains open to it) if the space had been presented with more formality and/or coherence. I think it’s significant that Robert corrects himself in the above quotation. He seems to recognize that formalness isn’t the

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right word (why formal isn’t the right word is interesting in and of itself), but he turns to a major standby of composition in order to fill the gap—coherence. Really, Robert just seems to be arguing for more structure, like the structure he got in 731 regarding the Blackboard space, a structure he has since reproduced in his own course to his liking. In effect, Robert doesn’t protest the use of the wiki, as much as he did not find relevance in the ways in which we used it in 731. I find his call for coherence interesting since, when discussing his written work for 731, he mentions sitting down and writing solitarily in one Now that I’ve read Julie Jung, straight shot. So, even if the wiki had been more Nancy Welch, and others’ work concerning disruption and coherent, there is little likelihood Robert would have disorientation in the teaching of chosen to return to the space—as he didn’t return to writing (for my master’s thesis), I can better understand (and better Blackboard while writing his responses, even though he appreciate) your pedagogical felt it was organized with more efficiency. decisions concerning the work we did with the wikis in 731. But in I believe the reader can see Robert’s own learning such an intensive course as 731 preferences rising to the surface, working as one of the was, I had difficulty making the connections, particularly when I main catalysts for what technologies—and the ways in was trying desperately to retain which they are used—are introduced in his own everything I was learning every day while, like you mentioned classroom. Robert’s reaction reminds me as a teacher before, I was simultaneously and a researcher that disruption may at times be seen as attempting to find my place in a new community. a stumbling block to some writers and thinkers. At the same time, I also can’t help but want to push Robert I think, then, that in the context of 731, more explicit instruction further, to have him experiment more with uncertain concerning why we were doing spaces and places in his own learning and in his what we were doing and how similar activities might benefit our pedagogy. Robert’s comments also remind me that I, students might have been useful too, am a major catalyst for the types of work, and the for me. At the same time, maybe that was there, and I just can’t ways I expect participation to occur, in the classrooms I recall it. The implicit instruction inhabit. Perhaps, if we were to have pushed the was there, the modeling of effective teaching practices was wikispace into a more folksonomic construction during there, too, but I think that more 731, we would have encouraged Robert to create the whole-class, reflective discussion about folksonomic pedagogy and organization and clarity he requires for his own the use of wikis in the classroom learning—to compare his learning style with the one he would have “made it stick” for me. saw represented on the wiki and to reflect on how and

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why they were different. Jeff also speaks to the feelings of informality in regards to the wiki in his interview. Yet unlike Robert, Jeff seems to think this unrest results from the rapidity with which wiki contributions become public: “Some people, y’know, don’t like it because you feel kind of rushed. It’s going to be on there and everybody is going to see it. So I think that that can maybe limit their thinking in some ways. You know in terms of, having to come up with something on the spot and the idea that everybody in the class will be collaborating and working with this. It’s supposed to take more time with y’know coming up with a definition or whatever you’re trying to do with it.” Here, Jeff equates this feeling of being rushed with the pressure to perform in acceptable ways in front of his peers. He links feeling “rushed” with the fact that, “It’s going to be on there and everybody is going to see it.” Jeff articulates how peer pressure is alive and well in the graduate course, where he feels pressured to not only perform well, but to do it with a group, to bare himself and his ideas in a way he hasn’t been asked to before. And while Jeff here hits on one of the ways he might be silenced by the “wise crowd” of a graduate course, he doesn’t explicitly then articulate that the wiki helped him move past this discomfort. Clearly, the wiki as a disruptive space resting in invention instead of completion—at least in the way I imagined and then Bre and I implemented it—was problematic in both productive and resistant ways for Robert and Jeff as both students and as teachers/scholars. Perhaps if we had broken further away from the group work, student-centered model we unerringly fell back on, Robert and Jeff would have seen the space in a different light, would have been able to separate productive chaos from disorganization. Unlike Robert’s desire for more structure and organization, or Jeff’s fears over classroom publication, other teachers actually wanted the wiki to delve further into the collaborative realm. Luke also didn’t, at this time, implement the wiki in the class he was teaching, but in his interview he is more hopeful about what the ways in which the wiki was used in 731 and what he sees it as offering in one of the first year classes he teaches. Charlotte: So now that you’ve finished 731, what have you learned about either technology in general, or specifically the wiki, and how you can implement that in your own pedagogy? Luke: You mean what I learned after the class or looking back at the class? Charlotte: looking back at the class.

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Luke: Well, as far as the wiki goes, I didn’t even know the wiki existed [pause]. I taught here for a year before and I tried the Blackboard wiki which is even worse [than the composition wiki]. Charlotte [laughing]: Right. Luke: [drawn out] So, I think it made me keep thinking about using the wiki instead of giving up on it. I don’t know that I would use the wiki myself, because it’s still [pause]. Unless, of course, I haven’t tried it. There might be ways of manipulating it so that it would work for me. I actually went to a conference where somebody did a, and I haven’t actually really checked out the site, but they were using a wiki space online that looked like it was more useful. But maybe our wiki does that and I just haven’t seen it work that way. Luke saw one of his major gains in 731 as the discovery of a departmentally housed wikispace. Despite the fact that most interviewees were new to teaching and Miami before 731, no other interviewee expressed excitement or delight over the discovery of the wiki’s existence. Luke, as an experienced teacher, calls attention to the fact that the school even providing an open wikispace for its English classes is somewhat of a privilege and a luxury. Luke is also one of the few teachers to refer to the wiki as “ours”—other interviewees used mostly distancing language, referring to “the wiki” or “wiki” throughout their interviews. And even though Luke doesn’t fully explain himself in the above quotation (using “it” and half sentences fairly frequently in his discussion), earlier in his interview he argues that he doesn’t use the composition department’s wiki because of the setup of the site and its inability to encourage as much crowd work as he would like. Luke shares, “And then, they told us one problem is that only one person can be signed in at once which makes it a different sort of collaborative space and also kind of a reference tool. You know, maybe other people used it as they were developing [English] 111.” Consequently, Luke chooses not to use the wiki because he wants the site to enable greater collaborative capabilities for several users, i.e. the possibility for several users to be interacting within the space at the same time—more like Googledocs, Buzzword, Soho, or Etherpad.43 Luke is one of the students in 731 who had not only taught before, but had also taught curriculum very similar to Miami’s before he enrolled himself in graduate school. He speaks

43 For more on the different available types of synchronous online writing environments like Google Docs, see David Pierce’s MakeUseof.com article Five Great Alternatives to Google Docs You Should Consider. 122

several times during his interview about enjoying the course, but not changing much of his teaching practices because what he had done in the past had worked so well for him. So, it’s not surprising that he chose not to use the wiki, especially since he again, at another time in his interview, mentions that only one person can be signed into a single wikipage at a time on the departmentally supported wikispace. Luke: The thing is, I think what would be good about the wiki is if different people could edit it. And [the English department wiki] wasn’t really conducive to that because [users have] to sign in [to gain access to the site]. So, it was easier to just tell [group mates in 731 what to write], just to talk about [what we wanted to put in the wiki]. So, I guess, how is that different from Word? I’m not sure. As in other places in his interview, Luke seems to suggest that could multiple people sign in and add/delete portions of the wiki’d pages at the same time, or synchronously, he would be much more likely to implement it as an inventive workspace for groups in his classroom. In other words, Luke wants to delve further into the overlapping spaces that wikis can provide communities. Consequently, unlike Robert, Luke actually wants to push further into folksonomic invention and production and finds the confines of the current wikispace to not be as conducive to these practices as he would like. In order to get at a more collaborative system, Luke has embedded a wiki-like approach to his students’ uses of wordpress. He states, “I use [a home website] like the wiki. I have a page that I call the class blog and then I will write an exercise on there and each group will post their own comment. So it works kind of like the wiki except that it’s linear so that you can view everybody’s responses and pull it up on the board really easily and then we talk about the different paragraphs and things and it’s also embedded in the whole context of the website and so it’s not like we’re going to a different site to work on it.” So while he has not found a wikispace he particularly likes, he is still working on the concept of folksonomic work to build meaning as a crowd. And while Luke is focused on the type of collaboration available through the current wiki system (desiring a more folksonomic space), Jeff positions his use more in line with wise crowd theory—although he still highlights the linear/naming model in the blog he has chosen for his classes. Consequently, one of the implications of this work might then be that teachers, including myself, must pay more attention to the unique affordances and limitations of the digital spaces they choose to use for folksonomic work.

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Of course, Jeff had a decisive moment in the course, during which his ideas of what types of work should be made public were changed, when he realized that he didn’t need to “clean up” his group’s wiki work and that he wouldn’t be “judged” based on his contributions. And while this change facilitates finding a new and different model of teaching for Jeff, he still indicates feeling apprehensive about the lack of control and/or polish that might result through use of wiki’d spaces. As Jeff shares earlier regarding his future use of the wiki, “I think if I were to use it [more] in 111, I would want to have a conversation before using it. Saying that, ‘Why are we using this? To create ideas. Not to come up with perfect sentences with perfect grammar.’” Here, Jeff discusses how the pedagogical practices in 731 impacted his understanding and implementation of his own teacher praxis. I remember in the beginning of 731, day one, and we didn’t know each other at that point. So it was really interesting, because they put us into small groups right away and had us talking and getting to know each other that way and doing things on the wiki right away. We did a Google Earth exercise, so y’know, I thought that was really interesting. Because we had to mimic what we did on day one in 731, I had to do that on day one in my 111— putting them into small groups, getting them talking right away. And so right away, right off the bat, they had us do activities that our students would be doing, and using, whether it be discussion board, composition wiki. (Jeff) Jeff is one of the few instructors—like Luke before him—to make connections between teaching activities and policies in 731 with the first year courses he would soon be teaching. Jeff notes, “Because we had to mimic what we did on day one in 731, I had to do that on day one in my 111—putting them into small groups, getting them talking right away.” Jeff also explicitly links community building in the beginning of his dialogue with the technological activities completed in 731 on the discussion boards, Google Earth,44 and the wikispace at the end of the piece. Clearly, Jeff sees a connection between encouraging community formation in different ways and the types of technologies classrooms engage in together. This type of instruction in 731— instruction that led to direct application—seems to have really hit home for Jeff and his understanding of collaborative work. As the Google Earth exercise and wikispace were introduced together, in order to get students thinking about the theme of space and place (as I

44 The GoogleEarth exercise was attached to the example given in the earlier pages of the chapter and asked students to first position themselves in relation to their peers from the physical spaces they had all come from to be at Miami University. 124

stated earlier, the current theme for the English 111 course they would soon be teaching), the two different technologies have also solidified together for Jeff as the most productive place at which his course could also start. Charlotte: So, you mentioned right at the beginning you were using the wiki [in your English 111 course]? So could you talk about what you were using [the wikispace] for, and whether or not you found it productive or helpful? Jeff: Sure. I found it very productive in terms of [pause]. We had [pause]. I was talking about the Google Earth exercise—where we had to come up with, basically, the first time we used it, we had to in groups come up with a group definition of place and a group definition of home and then we had to [pause]. And so it was really neat to be able to come up with those definitions and then submit it and as a group pull them all up together on the board and come up with a class definition of it. And I think that that; I had never worked with composition wiki before and in the future I want to work with it more in my own class. But I think it’s important because, you know, it gets the idea right across to students that they’re working with collaboration. And the idea that y’know, you can build meaning together. Jeff again relates, in the most detail he uses throughout his entire interview, the first day experience of 731 and how he brought the same activities into his own classroom. The repetition of the GoogleEarth and Wikispace activity of place and space (that led to folksonomic definitions of space and place that the instructors could use and replicate in their own classrooms), along with his understanding of how the wiki could work as a space to “generate ideas,” define how Jeff understood the wiki both within 731 and the purpose of it in his own classroom. Yet he goes a step further in linking GoogleEarth and wiki types of exercises with aggregation of the crowd, through his explanation of how 731 used the information. Jeff shares, “And so it was really neat to be able to come up with those definitions and then submit it and as a group pull them all up together on the board and come up with a class definition of it.” What’s also noteworthy within the above portion of the quotation is that Jeff has inserted a coherence step into the activity that was not present in 731. While all of the definitions were shared during the course time of 731, Bre and I—in conjunction with the research protocols—did not provide a single, stable definition of space or place to the new teachers during our iteration of the Google

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Earth activity in 731.45 Yet, Jeff has inserted, much like Robert, his own learning needs and styles into his memory of the effectiveness of the different spaces, activities, and eventual learning outcomes used in 731 and the classroom in which he teaches. Jeff also argues for the wiki as a place, more so than in his discussion of the other types of technologies that are “important.” He does this because, in his own words, “it gets the idea right across to students that they’re working with collaboration. And the idea that y’know, you can build meaning together.” So while Luke wished for a more collaborative space in line with more conversation about folksonomy, Jeff picks right up on the possibilities that wikispaces hold for the crowd in relation to meaning building, using the space and place definitions as a starting point. Jeff argues that wikis, in homage to the translation of their name, quickly demonstrate to crowds that they can effectively build meaning together. As one of the more inexperienced teachers in the course, Jeff might have felt an urgency to find ways in which the crowd could be managed—which is why he might have placed more emphasis on the supposed “conclusions” reached through the wiki than we, meaning Bre and I, might have in the 731 space. Lastly, one of the most avid users of the wikispace who had not known about the availability of the wiki at Miami was Maria. What’s interesting is that Maria turned toward the wiki application inside Blackboard (a space, if the reader remembers, Luke finds extremely difficult to work with). Below, Charlotte asks Maria how she decided to use the wiki in the course she was teaching. Maria shares her own activity that again takes advantage of crowd knowledge building. Charlotte: So you mentioned that you are incorporating wiki in your own class now? Maria: Yeah, I have. Charlotte: Could you just talk about that? Maria: Yeah, I used it for brainstorming. I used [the wiki application] within the Blackboard space for brainstorming questions for interviews on the ethnography. So I told the class to, ‘cause they were all [pause]. I wanted them all to try a different data gathering method besides thick description. And that they would each create a question for someone else in the group that they hadn’t thought [of themselves] for the interview. And then we discussed [the new questions]. And so, they did that and then we opened up the wiki on the board. And

45 While it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Bre or I would or did offer a stable definition of space or place to the class, we both made a highly conscious effort to resist this practice. We also spoke to the class together, working to help one another avoid offering stability. 126

then, we just talked about why they chose that question and if it was useful or if it wasn’t. And, I think for some people it worked and others it didn’t help. But I think it kept three- quarters of the class—which is all I can really ask. It helped them think about stuff that they hadn’t included or hadn’t thought of. On her own, Maria designed and implemented the interview question activity through the wiki that she describes. However, the reader can easily see how the model of basic task, individual contribution, and then group discussion was built, for good or for ill, from the wiki’d activities Maria herself completed in 731. And while the type of activity Maria designed is easily one of the basic ways teachers have students work collaboratively together, the rapidity with which students moved from individual questions to group work, back to a whole group discussion— where the questions were easily displayed for everyone and then discussed with an emphasis on what, as Maria says, “they hadn’t included or hadn’t thought of”—points to crowd theory, aggregation, and then disruption, all hallmarks of a folksonomic, feminist pedagogy. It may come as no surprise to the reader, then, that Maria is a feminist. One of the reasons why Maria enthusiastically embraced the wiki could be tied to her identification as a feminist. Maria not only responded well to the types of work we, meaning Bre, the new teachers, and I, completed in the 731 wiki, but she also demonstrates the ability to then move past the initial activities given to her in 731 to create other similar tasks for students in the English 111 course she was teaching. In fact, Maria was one of three self-identified feminists interviewed regarding the 731 wikispace. Interestingly, of all of the self-identified feminist students interviewed and the additional materials collected for the study, students who embraced feminist pedagogies, readings, and methodologies were more likely to integrate wiki’s into their own classrooms and to respond positively to the work done on the 731 wikispace. Finding 3: Students saw the main purpose of the wiki as a validation of their community and a way in which they could openly interact with their peers regarding the readings in a low pressure environment. Of all of the findings gathered from the 731 folksonomic study, by far the strongest finding was that the new students/teachers believed the wiki helped them to quickly get to know, and form bonds with, their peers in a way that the other technologies presented in 731 did not, as well as created a place they could return to, in order to understand different materials covered in the course in different ways. One of the more adamant opinions of this phenomenon comes, not

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surprisingly, from Jeff. As stated earlier in the chapter, 731 is a very tightly compacted course, spanning only three weeks of the summer before the start of the fall semester, and many students feel overwhelmed with the amount of material they need to cover before arriving to class. And we also used the wiki throughout 731 in terms of breaking down the dense theory readings that we were reading every night. So it’d help because some night we’d have hundreds of pages to read for the next day and then you had. So, you know, you had one group that would focus on one reading and then the other group focus on another reading, so it was good because even if you weren’t able to get through them all, or you didn’t understand one idea from one, you had different I definitely find myself in agreement with what the groups focusing on one reading then, again, interviewees have said concerning bringing them all together. So then that was this affordance of the wiki. Additionally, I think, at times, it good to be able to go back to, when writing our was our struggling through this reflective essays, too. To go back to the wiki and new approach to learning/group work that helped us to get to know see the arguments that people were making, each other and, for me, at least, not what information they were pulling from the feel intimidated by those who might have more teaching reading. (Jeff) experience. Jeff cites the wiki as one of the main helps he found in the 731 course and he also links this work to the completion of the short essays students were required to write throughout the course. Jeff relates how a folksonomic practice helped him not only interrogate the readings, but his own ideas. Through Jeff’s repetition of, “even if you weren’t able to get through them all, or you didn’t understand one idea from one, you had different groups focusing on one reading then, again, bringing them all together. So then that was good to be able to go back to, when writing our reflective essays, too,” the reader is reminded of the initial use of the wiki as a place of invention and exchange. Clearly, it was a space that functioned in just this way for Jeff, as he mentions returning to and seeing ideas anew. It’s interesting to recall that Jeff also harbored some anxiety about sharing his ideas over the wiki. In balance to those feelings, the reader can see here that Jeff obviously felt the risk of exposure was worth the payoff. He recursively used the wikispace to rethink and write his reflective responses to the course and the readings. For example, after the space and place wiki day, Jeff writes, On the second day [of class]…I hope, [to] get them thinking about the classroom (and by extension, any place or space) as a space that is not fixed or static—as a space that can

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change. It will introduce them to the notion that place should be seen as a continual process[.] During the second week, I am thinking about an activity that will ask students to analyze different “Place Blogs”; the goal of this exercise is to see how place blogs (not all blogs) can be seen as a form of activism because, among other things, they emphasize attachment to our natural surroundings (with pictures, audio, and discussion boards) in a materialistic society. (Reflective Essay 1) His reference of place and space as places that are not fixed or static, as well as his discussion of mental attachment resonate with the definitions provided by himself and his peers during the day’s workshop and discussion. And while it’s possible that he might have come to these conclusions on his own, his own admission of returning to the wiki as a source of inspiration and community would seem to add weight to the claim that the wiki was a place of recursivity for Jeff—a place with a practice he hoped to introduce to his own students. Maria also describes how the wiki helped her build community with others and understand the theoretical readings of the course at the same time. In this instance, Maria saw the wiki-work as a way to share the burden of the material and she saw the wiki as a way to approach information in a way that wasn’t as possible in the other technological spaces, like Blackboard, that were implemented in 731. I liked the wiki, I think it really helped us in terms of [pause]. Everyone had to really get together and especially the one where we had to all switch, where we had to move the computer around and each person had to try to transcribe. I liked it because it was like, ‘Well, what did you get out of the reading? What did you understand from it?’ stuff like that. Well, what it really helped with collaboration and helping me especially. If I just read that, whatever article that was and I read it last or I was totally fried and I didn’t absorb a lot of stuff, like the main idea but not a lot of specifics? That’s what really helped me pull back in and then I was able to if I had my book with me highlight it again or write notes again in class, it just helped me imitate it better and at a different angle that I wouldn’t necessarily have been able to by myself. (Maria)

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Folksonomy, here, is not being implemented for Maria in a way that is significantly different than traditional collaborative learning pedagogy—again, probably at the fault of the way we designed these activities from the get-go. However, by blending her own understanding with that of her peers in a way that focused on the crowd as the I felt this way, too, particularly when the wiki-work directly authority allowed for Maria to experience a followed a presentation from one folksonomic moment, where the nomoi of the of the teachers that while perhaps containing important information classroom was built by the folk of new teachers. The we needed to know, did not wiki worked to remove some of the burden of provides space for us to actively learn or to take any real “absorption” for Maria by allowing her to write, speak, responsibility for our learning. and transcribe the thoughts of her peers. Maria also Though I found the group work on the wiki difficult, I remember shares how the wiki “helped with collaboration,” as she several moments in 731 in which had to ask her peers what they thought about the this challenge was a welcome one: engaging with the wiki and readings and to place those ideas up against her own. attempting to work together with But perhaps most importantly, the wiki-work allowed my group members to participate in the assigned activities made me Maria to “pull back” and “imitate” material “better and feel that I was doing something at a different angle” than she would “have been able to productive and worthwhile, rather than passively listening to a by” herself. Clearly the crowd is at work here for Maria presentation. in productive and disruptive ways as she works through her own identity as a teacher, scholar, and student.

Conclusion As a form of practice, and the three primary results of the study show, the wiki did require the students/teachers to take charge of the information in interesting and informative ways that then contributed positively to their understandings of their own agency and identity both within and without the course. Yet, ultimately the use of the wiki as a folksonomic space needs to be greatly expanded in the 731 space if instructors of the 731, 698, and 699 sequence of courses hope to more fully realize the possibilities of a disruptive, yet collaborative space for many different types of learners. Was the project a total failure? No. Did we, as implementers of CFF rely too heavily on the training we received in traditional student-centered pedagogy to interact with the new teachers and the wiki? Yes. If the folksonomic opportunities in the 731, 698, 699 course sequence were expanded for the new teachers, a greater transfer of more of the

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discourses of power might be made available to the graduate students within the class. As the teachers grapple with the new theories, ideas, and practices introduced to them by the institution, it becomes imperative that we encourage these teachers to engage in the types of critical practices most likely to be sustainable away from individual courses or institutions. Of course, there are ways we could have pushed the folksonomic space further—by asking students to read and bring in texts of their own choosing, I think this is maybe what I making the wiki space a focal point of a majority of the was trying to get at earlier. course, asking students to generate materials linking postings to actual classroom practices, and continuing the use of the wiki throughout the 731, 698, 699 sequence of courses. Yet, I hope this small entrance into folksonomic pedagogy will eventually lead toward a sustained space after a formal study is conducted as to its effectiveness and ineffectiveness. And its seems as if the department is heading in this direction anyway, as they look at forming an online space that theoretically would include many spaces that were more folksonomically designed than any formal documents and online collaborative spaces now housed by the English Department. And while the research associated with the 731 folksonomic space should give writing pedagogues some insight as to how to more usefully incorporate folksonomic pedagogy into a teaching assistant training, graduate level space, students at different levels, with different levels of interest in the materials they are exposed to, will of course react differently to the at times overwhelming amount of freedom folksonomic pedagogy can create in learning spaces. Research must still be done at the beginning levels of college composition in order to gauge how new college students might most effectively harness the wisdom of the crowd. With the above goal in mind, José—a first-year teacher—and I conducted a year-long inquiry into folksonomy as it might relate to activism through the first year composition sequence of classes at Miami University.

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I suppose what I’m really confessing is that I’m sick of moderation and objectivity. I want someone to stick up once for excess. What would be so terrible about turning the research paper into a piece of immersion journalism? the argument into a rant? the personal narrative into radical confession? … The worse that would happen is that there might actually be pleasure and play and passion in our courses. –Lad Tobin, Reading Student Writing, 2004 Chapter 5 Playing with Purpose: Folksonomy in the First-Year Classroom Introduction Critical, feminist folksonomy (CFF) turns writing instruction into presenting to students rhetorical situations, both in and out of the academy, so that students and teachers might more rhetorically enter into the written discussions and experiments in their lives. Teachers can use their position to help the crowd organize itself in ways that challenge the overarching student- driven nomos, educating those within the group of any given classroom and actually moving from the bounds of one writing classroom into another. The tipping point with this approach is the “can”—the crowd must desire the help of the instructor. CFF can be deployed in such a way as to make students responsible for creating the content of not only their course, but introducing more complex content to courses that are alongside and after their own. In the spring of 2009 to the Fall of 2010, an instructor named José (a second year doctoral student, at the time) and I attempted to do just this very thing—use the theories of folksonomy in a first year writing classroom in order to center the curriculum on the folk of the course in ways that stretched beyond schema, or singular classroom boundary, to enter into a discussion with the different folk we find inhabiting first-year writing from one semester to the next and one another. In this chapter, I’ll first explain the impetus behind the addition of this particular CFF project into an undergraduate writing course’s curriculum. Second, I’ll share what the classroom conventions were for this particular class amongst a set of courses required for first year students at Miami University, before outlining the qualitative study I conducted with the help of José in order to qualitatively assess the effectiveness of the CFF instruction happening within the undergraduate course. Third, I’ll share the results of the data collected by this study before closing with brief suggestions regarding the future implementation of projects which foster a

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folksonomically driven power structure within an undergraduate curriculum. At the end of the dissertation, I also provide some of the course materials, such as the department, teacher, and student created requirements and documents, so that the reader might gain a more holistic picture of the process José, the students, and I underwent over the course of the year. The reader will notice that much like chapter four, as I share the results of the classroom study conducted in relation to CFF work, I reproduce large sections of the interviews, and in this case student work, conducted in relation to the study. Again, I do this in order to try and be as open and transparent in my interpretation as possible. As a feminist researcher whose work is often connected to the classroom, I know that the interpretation of materials is the key to any research. Ultimately, with this chapter, I hope to encourage conversation from differing viewpoints in relation to the ways in which power might operate in the classroom through the inclusion of CFF work and theory, an inventive, ongoing, interstitial conversation that, through its open construction, resists closure. With the above goal in mind, I have also asked José to add his voice to the dialogue I produce here, so that this chapter is also a community constructed space of knowledge and meaning-making.46 Another Folksonomic Beginning As a researcher, I was excited about the opportunities trying different curricula based on the same grounding theories would provide. The English 731 and 112 spaces were markedly different from one another, allowing for investigations of race, class, and gender in relation to education and activism to be engaged with in completely different ways. Where 731 started a graduate sequence of courses, English 112 is a composition and literature course that most first year students take. As a teacher-learner, I’ve often enjoyed texts focusing on praxis (such as Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Brenda Jo Brueggemann’s Disability and the Teaching of Writing collection), but rarely have I seen work that attempts to pinpoint how the same theories, enacted differently with an attention toward population, might be used across different learning groups. I understood that crafting studies for groups many would see as disparate would be difficult. But ultimately, I felt it was important to try and see potential practices, potential differences through the lens of folksonomy. To see the theories associated with crowd intelligence dynamically—as organic, playful, and full of use.

46 Student participants agreed to also produce commentary on the chapter, but unfortunately became too enmeshed with current coursework to respond at the time this chapter was produced for defense. 133

Whether on or off line, at graduate or introductory levels, students must be given opportunities to drastically shape the curricula we ask them to interact with; must have opportunities to move toward critical praxis in, out, and alongside the often too tightly controlled environment of the classroom. So while the 731 space was more focused on overall teacher identity and balancing department and personal curricular design, and 112 was one of the first college classes many undergraduate students would take, ultimately both spaces were focused on the ways new people in new places interact with rhetoric and writing to make an intellectual home for themselves. A place magic could happen. Consequently, even with these differences, both spaces institute practices that demonstrate the opportunities for wise crowd interaction— opportunities that, although different, reveal an opening for folk to shape the nomoi in the kairotic ways available through CFF pedagogy. Also unlike the graduate course study, the folksonomically driven inquiries in José’s class were not digitally based, and I want to take a few minutes to explain the reasoning behind José’s and my choices to keep the project largely offline.47 With my interests in CFF work based in the classroom, I set out to experiment with folksonomic pedagogical strategies. When working through different ideas of where and when I might enter, I made a conscious effort to pair up with two different college instructors—one of which was in a “laptop classroom” and the other of which was in a “traditional classroom”— teaching the same course, with fairly similar goals. And while my time in the laptop classroom was enlightening and interesting, this chapter will follow the year long journey José, sixty-six students, and I took with a CFF project spanning three classrooms over two semesters in “traditional” classroom spaces. The space of “tradition,” at least in the ways that the studies rolled forward, seemed to provide for more fluid work—writing and exploration that spanned a mediated continua, chosen, for the most part, by the students themselves. Some readers may still wonder why, if so much of the dissertation has focused thus far on how folksonomy was generated from computerized locations and communities, I now wish to turn toward offline environments. My reasoning is much like that of Nancy Welch’s, demonstrated in her 2005 article “Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Post-Publicity Era” and her 2008 book Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World. In her

47 Although, as I’ll note in the results section, the overt university designation of a paper-based course did not prevent several students from integrating digital work into their projects, nor did José insist that students only work in more traditional alphabetic mediums. 134

article, Welch critiques the academic embodiment of a completely postmodern pedagogy because, as she notes, “as compositionists have shown a renewed interest in public writing, neoliberal social and economic policies have shrunk the spaces in which most students’ voices can be heard” (1). So even though hard-wired computer labs, laptops, and online coursework are becoming ever more prevalent throughout composition curricula at all levels of education within the United States, a fair amount of courses—especially those in remote or under-sourced regions—are still taught without the benefits and drawbacks inherent in standardized, digital classrooms.48 And, in fact, as Welch argues here, as these physically public places continue to shrink, it becomes even more important to encourage student participation equally in the physical and the digital spaces making up their academic and social lives in ways that matter to them. Consequently, adopting a pedagogy, or starting a research project, without active consideration and resistance to the move to digitize all As a teacher, I sometimes wonder what we do when we encourage spaces ignores Welch’s call that, “rhetorical space— students to engage in “public that is, public space with the potential to operate as a writing.” It seems like stressing the publication of works for a broader persuasive public sphere—is created not through well- audience through the use of intentioned civic planning or through the application of technology often results on students defining public as a place a few sound and reasonable rhetorical rules of conduct. “not here,” an “elsewhere,” Ordinary people make rhetorical space through sometimes resulting in students overlooking the importance of the concerted, often protracted struggle for visibility, audience and responses in the voice, and impact against powerful interests that seek classroom. The “here” is also, in some cases, a public space, and the to deny visibility, voice, and impact” (477). One of the technology-based responses will larger take-aways from Welch’s piece is that students take a different shape an dimension than a student’s verbal or need to be presented with opportunities to make handwritten response in the rhetorical space; assuming that the instructor, the classroom. I suppose something truly radical could happen in teacher, in rhetorical classrooms can assign agency, teaching and learning how to instead of pushing the students to find their own navigate digital and non-digital spaces rather than favoring one or agency in moments of kairos, undercuts Welch’s main another. point. “Civic planning” will only get educators so far, before we must step back and allow the crowd to make rhetorical space. Simply by encouraging

48 For more on access, see Charles Moran’s “Access: The A-Word in Technology Studies” in Passions, Pedagogies and 21st Century Technologies and Annette Harris Powers “Access(ing), habits, attitudes, and engagements: Re- thinking access as practice” in issue 24.1 of Computers and Composition. 135

students to see their composing choices as wide-open and not limiting students to one or more modes of composing, asking students to slide from the digital to the physical, may encourage a deeper sense of inventive play that takes into account all of the places and spaces the students encountered in their daily lives—the digital, the physical, and interstices. We wanted students to have the movement, the fluidity to choose, to “make rhetorical space” in ways that mattered to them, and in ways that would match other experiences they had around the university, both explicitly digital, and not. And perhaps most importantly, we wanted to test crowd theory in a way most educators—whether teaching in the basement of a community center, or connecting long distance through message boards and synchronous chatting—could identify. José and I knew that one of the first steps in imagining how students might be asked to make rhetorical space would come from an understanding of the departmental requirements placed on the courses within which we would be working. In the last several years (2009 forward), Miami University began a major push to center their “Top 25” attended courses on self-directed (or inquiry-based) learning models. For English 112, the course with which the study became paired, this meant shifting the focus to an inquiry driven writing model. The ENG 112 Inquiry Curricula encourages teachers to provide occasions for students to focus their studies on questions they come up with through their own interactions with the texts of the course (much as Hawk argues). Instructors are also asked to provide opportunities for students to build different projects in a manner consistent with the students’ own interests. Consequently, multiple genres and media related experiences are heavily laced throughout the multiple curricula provided by the department—that instructors might encourage students to explore their own inquiries through the affordances of digitized, mediated, or alphabetic texts. English 112 is second in a two part course sequence most first-year students participate in during their first year at Miami University. Unlike English 111, a course predicated on explicitly rhetorical texts (much non-fictional and historical) and writing, English 112 is titled Composition and Literature and argues for a blended understanding of both explicit and implicit rhetorical work at play in and with texts in a social world. The entirety of the course description is placed at the end of this chapter, so readers might gain a greater understanding of the curricula en totum. However, perhaps most useful to this discussion of what, exactly, students can be expected to

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accomplish in ENG 112 is the English Department website section describing the four major projects of the English 112 course, reproduced below. Major Inquiries and Writing Assignments

1. Close, Critical Reading —> results in a shorter “warm-up” paper focusing on a close reading and analysis of a single complex text or artifact (what does it mean? where and how does it apply?). 2. Cultural/Historical Interrogation —> focuses on understanding texts from different perspectives in time and place and on understanding texts from the point of view of different audiences and identities (such as gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, age, class, etc.); typically results in two longer papers. 3. Creative Production —> applying these various tools for textual analysis to understand a contemporary issue, problem, or scene; typically results in one longer paper. 4. E-Portfolio Inquiry/Final Reflection —> reflecting on your writing and reading practices through analysis of your coursework collected in an e-portfolio; typically results in one longer paper. (“Composition”)

As the reader can see, students are asked to first interrogate a text through “close reading,” before moving to the application of cultural and historical motives in two longer papers, and then applying what they’ve learned to a current event. At the close of the course, students compile this work into an e-portfolio or reflective paper-based portfolio that asks them to evaluate their work as a whole throughout the duration of the course. Of course, José’s and my experiences were slightly different than the “standard” 112 curricula because all of the courses where the CFF curriculum was in play were activist based, in line with the new interdisciplinary Western College program (WCP). The WCP invites students to take an active role in their education by self-designing their major in relation to living and learning communities with other students interested in highly individuated college experiences. Consequently, the 112 courses José would teach for the duration of our time together were based in the English Department’s standard curricula for all 112 courses, but were also heavily influenced by an activist framework supported by the Western Program. Students in José’s classes were a blend of students from the new Western Program and those entering Miami with

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specific majors in mind. So, the ENG 112 courses the study would take part in were built around the idea of students taking up active stances in their own educational experiences. With the Western Program approved, curricular outline in place, we made decisions regarding the physical space we would be working in over the course of the next year. José had the opportunity to teach in the “Western” section of campus,49 a space that is physically marked as different from the rest of Miami’s campus. Unlike the red brick that makes up the foundation of Miami’s public image, Western buildings are white stone and traditional classroom layouts— chalkboards, long and narrow rooms with darkly finished heavy tables flanked by wooden chairs—make up the majority of the spaces writing instructors teach in on Western. We kept the room assignment given to José because we saw an opportunity for the physical space of the study to become an object of the students own inquiries. Resistance, José and I believe, does not need to be scattered, nor is it always helpful to view it this way. Obviously, the university is one such place where dominance is not scattered, where students and instructors alike are carefully monitored, labeled, and understood according to status and the materials signifying these status positions. In resistance to this, José and I wanted to encourage positions that slide amongst, to, and from digital and physical spaces in very real and practical ways. José and I had many conversations about how, exactly, we could ask students to explore the consolidation of public space at the university. We understood this space to be both physical and digital. We wanted to encourage them to build a portion of the public sphere in ways where they would experience and react to the immediate pressures of both education and community boundaries; keeping the Western room assignment seemed to be a way we could allow this conversation to happen naturally, if the students so chose. After acknowledging our place departmentally and physically in relation to the course materials, the questions became: what is at stake in the classroom? What in the classroom represents power? What ways can we encourage students to push against, manipulate, change in relation to the work the university insists we “do” in the classroom? And while José and I could not ignore the departmentally approved curricula, we did have some wiggle room as far as assignments were concerned due to José’s involvement in Miami’s new Western Program. The front matter for the syllabus José wrote for the 112 courses using the folksonomic project can be seen in full in the appendices, yet I’d like to highlight the closing section of his

49 So named for its history as Western College for Women before Miami purchased the land and facilities. 138

course purpose. José spends a lot of time in his syllabus (and with the students in the courses) questioning the labels, he calls them “boundaries” in the excerpt, societies place on different individuals, actions, and texts. In the course, he embeds time for each student to reflect on every assignment completed and how that assignment might call into question or reify boundaries for the student and her community. Ultimately, José desires that students work as a community toward the following goals: [I]ncrease our understanding of contexts by crossing the borders imposed by the conventional modes of argument, traditional literary canon, and quotidian forms of expression. Grounded in collaborative learning, the course will encourage us to interact with each other as we handle and discuss the required and supplemental texts, thus learning from the ideas developed in and outside of the classroom. In analyzing and interacting with various texts, social conditions, and learners, the course will create an environment of reflection in which we will be able to position ourselves as writers, individuals, and scholars in relation to issues of personal and communal significance. (De la Garza) Consequently, much as Hawk suggests, as we began integrating the CFF curricula into the 112 courses José would teach, José had already framed his 112 course as a place where individuation meets communal collaboration as it interacts with artifacts provided by the course materials. The reader can see that when José and I met to discuss the possibility of doing a study with the courses he’d be working with during the fall semester of the 2009-2010 academic year, we were already “on the same page,” so to speak. We both actively pursued ways in which students might be allowed space to take-up more personal stakes in curricula that at most times, at least at the introductory level, are handed to learners as given. In order to theorize what this interaction might look like between students and teachers, José and I frequently returned to the scholarship and practices of Writing Studios. Perhaps most cogently discussed by Rhonda Grego and Nancy Thompson in Teaching/Writing in Thirdspaces, writing studios work to help students investigate how writing is influenced by and negotiated within the power structures of the university. As stated by Grego and Thompson: And if the distinction between researcher and subject, or the power of hierarchies between ourselves and students, are an unavoidable feature of institutional life in higher education spaces, we nonetheless found immense value in the way that the comparisons

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made available within Studio student and staff groups—using writing and reading assignments from within our academic institution and the attendant attitudes, feelings, and writing or reflections thereon within student and staff groups as “prompts”—also

Even today, I always include a made visible the complex social construction of people section on assignment sheets and ideas in the academic culture particular to our home labeled “Purposes” or “Objectives.” I ask my students to institution. (55) think about assignments as José and I were especially struck by the idea that the suggestions. As “prompts,” assignments fulfill their purpose “writing and reading assignments” would themselves once they, in fact, “prompt” a become the “prompts” by which discussions and student to write. As long as they are engaging with the proposed investigations of university boundaries would take objective somehow, once they start place. In other words, instead of completing yet another writing they can take the assignment in any direction that assignment, studio courses focus on evaluating what allows them to explore the makes assignments, “assignments.” Studios ask argument they want to write, not the argument they are expected to students to investigate: What gives assignments value in write. In this sense reflection is not the university setting? Why are they given value? What only a subject of retrospect, but also one of foresight, an exercise are students supposed to take from them? A main that composes rhetorical component of the studio system, then, is to give possibility rather than composing closure, so to speak. students time to ask why everyone in the university system is doing what they’re doing in relation to writing and how this work does or does not affect or accurately reflect the people it so desperately tries to encourage and shape. And while José and I could not, nor did we want to, shift the department curricula to reshape ENG 112 into a studio course—as studio courses were, in fact, available at Miami University during the time of the study—we nonetheless found great value in attempting a CFF project that used the studio idea of investigation of assignments as a base from which to grow and experiment with folksonomically driven curricula. The three different assignments that students would complete during the first semester of José’s classes were built by José to reflect the Western Program’s ideas of activism. These projects were labeled as “Inquiry I: Mechanisms of Community Development,” “Inquiry II: Historical and Cultural Interrogation,” and “Inquiry III: Cultural Production.” I have placed the purpose of the assignments and prompts, as written by José, in the appendices. These assignment prompts show the development of the main ideas of the course around community, history, and

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culture, give the reader a sense of the projects students were asked to complete, and detail the main written texts students read over the duration of the first semester courses. Students in the first semester of the pilot study would be completing assignments designed by José before beginning the process of redesign and repurposing for the next semester’s students. All of the prompts were accompanied by a writer’s memo and an introspective piece written individually by each student. The writer’s memo functioned as a written conversation between José and the student detailing what the student thought about the writing they were turning in. In addition, the writer’s memo allowed a place for the students to speak privately and individually with José about their progress as writers. The introspective pieces completed by students were not focused on the individual writer but rather what the writer thought about the concepts being discussed in the assignment and the course as a whole—how did the writer understand the main assignment in conjunction with the direction the course was heading and did the writer have any misgivings about the assignment as a way to investigate these issues. The readings, prompts, and layered assignments for José’s course were all carefully chosen to reflect the difficult and tumultuous work of (re)definition in relation to self, other, community, and the cultural constructs that pressure members and outsiders. In other words, José hoped to encourage students to become reflective about the nomoi that defined, categorized, and interacted with the students as folk both within and without the academy, by asking them to investigate these very issues from day one. With the above assignments in place, José and I designed a closing assignment to the course as the jump-off point for the CFF curricula: an assignment that would ask students to recreate, redesign, reimagine the original inquiry assignments in ways that more closely exhibited what they felt was important about writing and literature in relation to their experiences as students. What they believed other students might be best served learning about composition and texts in one of their first year college courses after spending a year on such work. Ideally, we hoped to provide a space for the nomoi to change through the participation of a folk culture in the kairotic process of reflection and creation. In the assignment below, by asking students to significantly redesign all but the last of the major inquiries in the course with attention toward their own understandings of the goals of ENG 112, the university requirements, and how their peers might be more effectively asked to enter in to discussions of activism, we hoped students in the first

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semester would begin a CFF space of assignment design that could carry into the next 112 course, and the next. Inquiry IV: Active Reflection and Reconfiguration Purpose: This assignment asks you to critically analyze the writing occasion created by both the assignments in the classroom and your approach to inquiry over the course of the semester. Your assignment has two parts: a reconfiguration of one of the three major inquiry assignments and an accompanying rationale for your adaptation. Part I: Assignment Reconfiguration We’ve considered the following questions throughout the course: Can we use the same discourses in global communities as we do in local ones?

In doing so, are we excluding others from our conversation and thus reconstructing the box we so eagerly try to dismantle? If so, how can our cultural and textual production address this exclusion?

How can we adopt alternative forms of communication that create not only third, but multiple planes that can function as spaces of negotiation where both verbal and non- verbal forms of expression can be developed?

What are the silenced conversations that take place within our communities? How does textual and traditional activism establish or hinder the development of forums for such voices?

As you reflect upon the assignment sheets of the following inquiries, please consider these questions: Did the organization of the assignment sheet facilitate your understanding of the inquiry?

How would you change the organization of the assignment sheet for future students?

Having completed the inquiry this assignment attempted to address, do you think your response was hampered or aided by the language of the assignment?

Does your completed product reflect what you initially believed the assignment was addressing?

How could the language be changed to more accurately reflect desired or expected assignment outcomes?

Given your answers to these questions, create all three portions (defining of terms, primary project, reflective memo) of a new assignment sheet to better represent your understanding of the course, since completing the inquiries.

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Part II: Reflective Analysis for Future Students While reflecting on your newly created assignment, and in keeping with your role as an active participant in the course and as an engaged learner, please consider the following questions:

What knowledge would you impart to future students regarding your reconfigured inquiry?

How could you encourage students to enter into a reflective and reconfigurative relationship with the new assignment?

How does your inquiry better meet the goals of the course in relation to your experience, and the experience you believe future students will have?

How do you think your inquiry will affect your participation with future writing assignments, either positively or negatively?

Given your answers to these questions, write a letter to future students addressing some of these concerns. Your goal is to help future students have a more thought-provoking educative experience in a writing classroom.

Your final project will entail: 1. Creating a revised assignment sheet in a group (with the defining of terms, primary project, reflective memo) 2. Presenting your reconfigured assignment sheet to the class in a recorded, formal presentation, as a group 3. Writing a reflective analysis letter you construct individually to future students (which takes into consideration the feedback you gained from your presentation) With the assignment, we wanted to, in effect, create a space that would bridge the gap of the classroom as a singular entity that did not have any lasting impact on future classes of the same type, while at the same time asking students and José to slide between the boundaries usually set between teacher-giving and student-receiving in relation to assignments. We understood by writing these questions we would already control more of the assignment than we wished, but we concentrated on providing students questions we did not have answers to and were genuinely curious regarding their answers. As the reader can see, José and I drafted several questions, in keeping with the open, inquiry based direction of the course. We attempted to formulate questions that were open-ended, without clear, concrete answers. By blending the overall questions of the course with the localized learning process students were currently experiencing,

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we hoped to draw together the global and local issues with which students had been working throughout the semester without placing too much pressure on doing any one thing. With the idea to ask students to write assignments in place, we then agreed that in order to create higher stakes regarding a power shift on the part of all participants—the students, the instructor, even the university as a wider system of evaluation and control—José would assign these creations in his next course. Making a point to assign the work that the first semester students created during the reflective sequence of ENG 112 to the second semester ENG 112 students, and communicating this overarching purpose frequently to the first semester group of students became a particular sticking point with José and me. Although, we did worry José might be disappointed with the level of engagement This was so stressful! I was so worried. When we started this, I he witnessed from allowing the students so much figured there would be two freedom in relation to the assignment, and we feared the possibilities: students will either be hesitant to change anything, or possibility that we might still believe José’s assignments they will try to change the were better. And, we were concerned that we might have assignment so much that they will lose sight of the curricular misgivings about what students created, in relation to objectives. time or supply constraints. Our largest anxiety was related to whether or not the assignments, in fact, would change little from the original constructs, or would change in unproductive ways. Would we be forcing a new batch of students to reap the consequences of a process they had no initial say in? Perhaps, yes. So, we decided to actively work against these issues. We embedded more low stakes tasks that students would be asked to complete in the course of reimagining the inquiry work they would create for their future peers. José provided a week of in class workshopping, and we asked the students to present their materials to one another ahead of the due date. In order to keep the presentations as low stakes as possible for the student groups, the only requirement of the discussion time was that every group had to participate. In addition, the time for the presentations was kept relatively short—a scant five to ten minutes for each group. Feedback was oral. The presentations were audio recorded and placed on the course management webspace, so that students could refer back to the comments of their classmates, José, and me. And while the groups were encouraged to work with what they heard from their peers, it was not a requirement of the assignment. After students

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received feedback from their peers, José, and I during the presentation/discussion portion, they then had an additional week to individually write letters to future students who would encounter their revised assignment in a spring semester English 112 course taught by José. We told the students that the letter should explain to new students the purposes of the assignment and how the new task relates to activist life in and around Miami University. The letters could be as short or as long as the students wished. And again, we kept these letters as low stakes as the rest of the project. There was no grade attached to the letters, aside from their presence as a component of the required final project. All in all, as the process continued forward, José made sure to reiterate to the students that he was more interested in what the students had to say, or how they saw the new assignments helping the new students work into and alongside the concepts the university felt were important, rather than spot or grammar checking the letters to see if they were stellar examples of epistolary rhetoric. He made sure to tell the students that these wise-crowd designed assignments would then be investigated, changed, and revised over the duration of the spring semester course with an attention toward gender, race, and power, as the new students interacted with the activist curricula. Consequently, throughout the duration of the year-long study, we saw ourselves concentrating most fully on the effects folksonomic assignment construction had on both the students’ and teacher’s ideas of themselves as learner-teachers. We were highly curious about what students would think about revising these materials, whether or not they would see as we did, as allowing space for more CFF participation in regards to education. Instructors and/or departments create most assignments that in turn fundamentally control most classroom discourse in teaching/learning situations. We hoped opening up the level of participation in such a fundamental way would not only allow us insight to how students might reimagine assignments if given the chance, but would also encourage reflection much like that offered throughout a studio course for all of the teacher-learners in the ENG 112 course. A secondary benefit of having students’ folksonomically constructed assignments, we hoped, was that it would enable José to more accurately gauge how students interacted with the activist curricula in a document that moved past the insularity of students producing “reflective text for teacher.” Shifting the reflective text to a “real” audience that the students would have a stake in helping and convincing, we believed would allow José to read what students actually thought was most important in the class, what they wished there was more of, and/or what they felt most

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comfortable doing from the perspective of community document designers. Because as collator, it is José’s responsibility to investigate what additional resources the community of students might need in order to more critically engage with the materials. If the students don’t address something José finds interesting, or the students start to tease out a kernel of knowledge José had not thought of before, it would fall on his shoulders as the resident instructor to place more materials, different materials, at the hands of the community—so they might interact more fully with the new and differing concepts.

This is exactly it. We are operating I believed using the reflective course sequence in an academic system where the in the pilot study would give the students and the instructor is constantly evaluating student writing. When students instructor, José, space to listen and learn from one evaluate teachers, they bubble-in another before pushing a more wholly CFF agenda pre-generated qualifiers of “good teaching” and sometimes write a forward during the second semester. It would allow José note. This [assignment] stages my and me to form a relationship around, with, and writing as a site of evaluation. They critique and evaluate the alongside the goals of the study, while at the same time writing produced by the giving us room to second-guess, change, and grow with institutionally-designated authority figure. And the letter speaks as the project. As we worked with one another and the much to future students as it does students throughout the duration of the year, we to the instructor—the warnings, the compliments. No evaluation packet attempted to embody Welch’s call regarding reflective has given me as much feedback learning that focuses on both success and failure, on about my teaching than their reflections. lack and production, in positive and explorative ways. As she states, “There’s also rewarding learning that takes place when we consider the myriad ways in which our attempts to make voices heard are foiled” (92). We wanted that reward, the knowledge that maybe we were failing, but we were part of a community of learners—a community that could experience new and interesting ways of interacting with students together. While José’s pedagogy already focused on critical ways of making meaning, he was excited to try and move further into the territory defined by Welch as activist. Much like hooks and Jung, Welch believes, “Such discussions can lead students and teachers to reflect on ingrained lessons about who is and isn’t authorized to speak on a topic” (123). José and I wanted to give students the opportunity to explore the CFF and liberatory pedagogy developments slowly and in concrete ways, to investigate who was authorized to speak and make knowledge and in what ways.

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Eventually, as I’ve stated above, our goal was to create enough materials in the first two Fall 2009 courses to enable exploration and investigation through play in one Spring 2010 course. In other words, a living, kairotic heuristic that would continue to be shaped by a folk intimately and inextricably tied to the materials by which the hierarchical systems of the university attempt to control the nomoi. In the end, first semester students wrote, revised, and changed the writing assignments that second semester students completed. In the course of the second semester, José chose one of the student generated assignments for the second semester students to complete during Inquiry I, allowed the group to choose what assignment they wished to complete from multiple student generated assignments for Inquiry II, and paired down an Inquiry III student generated assignment into a discussion and visual rhetoric exercise (snow days made completing a full Inquiry III almost impossible, if the students were to be given the opportunity to create their own assignments), eventually giving the students more time to then reimagine and present on their newly designed ENG 112 assignments for Inquiry IV. In order to map the effects of the work José and I completed with the students, I completed an IRB approved protocol that included several layers of data collection. Throughout the course of the study, I attempted to embody feminist research practices like those described by Gesa Kirsch and Joy Ritchie, and Ellen Cushman. In “Beyond the Personal: theorizing a Politics of Location in Composition Research,” Kirsch and Ritchie argue that feminist researchers must “investigate the relation between the knower and the known and explore the possibilities of collaboration with participants as they develop research questions, collect data, interpret findings, and write research reports” (148). In line with these ideals, I contacted participants to encourage them to provide their own commentary throughout the chapter. Consequently, José’s comments throughout the chapter are an attempt to further contextualize and complicate the findings, as I relate them, and to acknowledge that my interpretation of events is focused through an understanding of my own locality and training as a teacher-researcher. In Cushman’s The Struggle and the Tools, she sets out three practices she adhered to as a feminist participant- researcher working alongside a community that echo those of Kirsch and Ritchie, and I have tried to do the same. They are as follows: “(1) community members and myself would dialogically arrange mutually beneficial relationships; (2) the goals and analysis of this research would center around social issues salient to their daily struggles; and (3) we would author(ize)

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together the final written representations of their lives” (26). And while I address these issues in more depth throughout the chapter, my position as an instructor who was not teaching but was present in the course worked to create unique relationships amongst the students, myself, and José, especially within the second semester course. Clearly, working on pedagogy that places more power in the hands of students is a social issue salient to the lives of those in the English 112 courses. In the first semester, students designed assignments, gave oral presentations, wrote letters to future students, and four students agreed to be interviewed. In the second semester, students completed first semester assignments, designed assignments, gave oral presentations, wrote letters to future students, and one student agreed to be interviewed. Triangulation was created through the assignments (including writer’s memos), presentations, and letters to future students, while the interviews were used to help contextualize the data sets. In addition, I interviewed José throughout the course of both semesters to discuss the progress of the course. I asked and was granted permission by the students to sit in on the class and take observation notes for the duration of the year. Almost all students agreed that I could look at and cite the materials they created over the duration of the study: for the first semester, this included the new assignments, their audio recorded presentations, and the letters they wrote for future students; for the second semester, student materials included the essays and media completed for the CFF assignments, assignments rewritten a third time for the students who would be coming to José’s class next, their audio recorded presentations, and the letters they wrote for future students. Students from both semesters who agreed to be interviewed after the process was over were interviewed by me at a time and in a place of their own choosing. Students were asked notional questions that focused on three main points: their experience with and understanding of the course as a whole, their experiences with and understandings of the assignments (both instructor and student generated) as a whole, and notions of power and purpose within the class.50 In addition to the contributions of the students, José and I met and discussed the project throughout the duration of the year, audio-recording our talks for future use. José also gave me permission to use and quote from the materials he distributed to the students over the course of the year. In total, I collected five interviews, sixty-six sets of student writing, thirty sets of observation notes, and twenty audio recorded presentations, as well as four interviews between José and myself

50 A full listing of questions can be seen in Appendix H 148

over the course of the year. Overall, the multiple data sets provided a very rich tapestry from which to cull ideas about the project.

The Nomos of a Folk January 19th, 2010, Observation Notes

José: How is, how can, writing be tamed?

Student: Writing shouldn’t be tamed, but we all do it. We all tame our writing for one class or another.

José: As a teacher I’m trying to create assignments that will help you, or assignments for you, but how often are they actually for you? That’s interesting. Is the act of taming a good thing or a bad thing?

Student: I think it’s a bad thing because you don’t get your point across; you don’t get it out there. It’s an act of censorship.

Overall, the work produced by the students in relation to teacher-created and student-created assignments was labeled “similarly competent” by José. In other words, the writing did not suffer for being in response to student created assignments versus instructor created assignments, and the grade distributions stayed largely stable over time. José’s teaching evaluations also remained stable over the course of the project (by-and-large, José’s evaluations are very strong). The depth of engagement and student focus in relation to the assignment as a constructed document, however, did change. The frequency with which students referred to the assignments as malleable documents intended for specific purposes that were a larger part of their educational

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experiences (either for good or ill) increased, as did their discussions of themselves in relation to others in the class and the larger student community with which they were a part.51 In order to create a more robust picture of the timeline students engaged in, I’ll first be focusing on the second inquiry in the course series. Of all of the inquiries, the second semester students were given the most time in the course to reflect, process, plan, complete, process and reflect again on inquiry II. Unlike the first inquiry, where José chose the student created work the next students would be using, inquiry II provided the opportunity for students to choose as a group which inquiry they thought would be most productive. In order to collate everyone’s responses, José sent every student in the course a document that included six different assignment sheets. José provided all of the second semester students a packet of documents that explained the evolution of the assignment they would be completing. Along with the packet came an assignment that gave students an opportunity to write about and discuss what assignment they felt would best suit their needs and the course dynamics. The discussion of assignment opportunities was housed on blackboard and carried into an open discussion during the next class meeting. The first document in the packet was the original assignment that José gave the first semester in the Fall 2009 classes—the same “Inquiry II” assignment I provide in the appendices. The rest of the packet was made up of materials created by the first semester students from the original inquiry. To recap, five groups of those fall 2009 students, after completing the original assignment, then went on to redesign inquiry II, with varying degrees of engagement and success. For a full listing of the different assignments created by the first semester students, see the appendices. The first semester students all created redesigns that required the second semester students to engage in group work while producing characters in dialogue, characters in differing environments, the cultural construction of characters through stereotyping, or short plays. For the first semester students, creating these inquiries was an opportunity to engage in the work done “behind the scenes” of the classroom—an opportunity they appreciated. For example, in speaking about the occasion to create assignments, one student relates, “I feel like the student is kind of in a place where it’s like, ‘Here is what you need to do. Do it.’ And it’s never, ‘Well,

51 While the chapter will focus on a very small slice of data collected during the study (in order to present a narrative stream for the reader to follow), all students engaged in the year-long study expressed neutral or positive views about their experiences—there were no negative responses to any of the study components. 150

let me give you insight into what I’m thinking.’ Or, it’s This, in turn, contests who we are never, ‘This is the process that I use so that you can get accountable to as instructors. We a better understanding of how to do it as a student,’… often feel responsible to follow curricula that presupposes an and that’s what this assignment did. It gave me a better understanding of what students insight on how teachers are thinking, like a planning need or should want. But we don’t know. This is the radical moment ahead of what the student might be thinking.” Here, the for the teacher, a vulnerable student notes that unlike the coursework she has moment too—one where we trust that the student knows, better than participated in the past, the coursework she completed we do, how what he or she under the CFF pedagogy highlighted for her the is/could/will be thinking can be played with. relationship between teachers and students, particularly in the way teachers might think about students or the process by which assignments are created in the first place. With the above in mind, several of the first semester assignments provided additional questions and further points of clarity for the second semester students in the new assignments. In order to begin the inquiry during the second semester, then, José asked the second semester students to evaluate the five assignments in the packet for their usefulness to the learning goals of the individual students and to respond to the following questions: “1. Why did you select this assignment? 2. How/why does this assignment work for you better than the others? 3. How do you feel this assignment might further the topics we have been discussing in light of our current text, The Vagina Monologues?”52 José believed the questions would help complicate the ways the students thought about the assignments. He was concerned that students would choose what seemed to be the least amount of work, instead of looking into the course goals and the ways the assignment would then affect classroom discourses. While José asked the students to comment on what assignment they thought would further the class topics and work best for them, many students framed their responses around how the assignment would help/hinder the community of writers, together. In reference to the assignments focused on stereotypes, one student argued that, “These assignments will help students understand how different cultures of people really are, and the problems that arise from that.” Here, the respondent highlights how the assignment “will help students”; a focus on the

52 While some readers may see The Vagina Monologues as a particularly provocative or problematic text, the reading was included in order to coincide with campus events, falling in line with the activist framework of the course. 151

community is retained throughout the response. And while this excerpt falls close to answering the question regarding “furthering the topics,” other responses pushed more readily into the connections amongst self, community, and task. In a discussion of choice, another student remarked, “I think talking about characters is just a waste of time. How would we better out [sic] lives writing about a character’s personality? That’s why I think we should use option 3.” Here, the student explicitly connects his own life, and the lives of his colleagues, with assignment completion—ending by appealing to the audience at large with the first person plural “we.” The implicit suggestion born out in his piece is that “option 3” of the inquiry II assignment would better the lives of the community within which he considers himself a part. And yet another student seems more concerned with how her colleagues could benefit from the assignment, than with her personal preferences, when she states, “There might be a few students who are having a hard time reading the book, so hopefully we could get them up to speed on what is really happening in The Vagina Monologues.” The high frequency of the word “we” in the second semester student comments shows that the participants, as early as the second major assignment in the course understood the ENG 112 class as a communal project—born out in the tasks they were asked to complete both by José and the first semester students. Asking the students to explicitly comment on, and make decisions about, curricula from a standpoint of options, instead of eventuality, encourages learners to see themselves in play with a larger body of texts and purposes and asks them to make connections to larger educational goals on a day-to-day basis, much like how an instructor behaves when confronted with multiple ideas for best practices/best assignments. Of course, as the instructor, José’s role in this data collection is to work as an agitator, which he does through asking the students to explain their choices, but also a listener, as the students decide what assignments they’d like to complete. By placing the focus on the assignments as constructed options that José presents without an explicit stake (as he did not design the work students were choosing from), the dialogue is open and less filtered than what either José or myself has seen in the past, when we’ve asked students to comment on materials we’ve presented to them. Students are almost always trained to view their role as learner as underneath the institution and, in effect, underneath the instructor; there is little to no chance of getting an honest and open initial response to instructor created assignments, because grades (and their subjective nature) hover, specter-like, in the background. And while that specter might never be vanquished when educators are themselves operating

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under traditional grading schemata, the false-praise that, at times, accompanies instructor-to- student and student-to-instructor dialogue due to fear and hierarchical schemata is certainly lessened when neither student nor teacher must claim the work as “their own.” After the students commented on the assignments, José was free to also respond critically in a way that would be unavailable to him, had he been the creator of the assignments. The trust he was building with the students would have been likely to collapse had he engaged in criticism that the students would peg as “false modesty.” This initial low-stakes, aggregated task opened

This also positions the instructor, I the floor for students to continue their critiques of the think, as a non-expert on the assignments, as they progressed through the inquiry II assignment. I feel like often, students are trying to figure out arc. what I am looking for in their After making time for the students to talk and write work. When I am not the author of the assignment, we stage a setting about one another’s choices over the weekend, José where we are both learning gathered the three assignments that the students through critique and reflection. This then becomes a radical collectively agreed were the best: options one, three, and exercise in modeling (modeling four.53 José then distributed the student letters created by and revising assignments, modeling and critiquing prompts). the first semester students for the second semester students relating to the chosen assignments. Students read these letters before beginning their own work on the assignments they had chosen.54 Over the course of the next two weeks, students collaborated to complete their chosen inquiry assignment. Half of the course time when we were all together was devoted to discussing and complicating the readings students were doing outside of the class (which the students could choose to include or ignore in their completion of the current assignment). The other half of the class was spent on individual or group work relating to the inquiry, with José and I spending a majority of the time mingling and talking with students in relation to what was needed in order to complete the projects.55 Soon, the day came for students to turn in their final drafts of inquiry II. As each inquiry II assignment requires, students completed a group project relating to characterization, stereotypes, and social norming, individual writer’s memos, and introspective pieces. Almost to a fault, all of

53 These assignments can be found in the appendices. 54 For a sampling of the letters written by the students, see the appendices. 55 Nancy Welch’s notion of “novelistic discourse,” as discussed in her work Getting Restless (see pgs. 62-64) was used as a model for the majority of these interactions with literary texts. 153

the writers’ memos completed by students commented in detail on the effectiveness or ineffectiveness they perceived in the assignment. Students specifically called out issues they had with the assignment and offered explanations regarding how they dealt with these issues. This overt attention to the assignment as a construct that could be manipulated and changed to suit the needs of the students continued to increase as students moved through the curricula. Below, John explains the process he went through when he first read the assignment options up to the completion of his work: I read into the different inquiries several times before I decided what I wanted to do. At first, I decided I wanted to write the inquiry about two separate characters and their particular dialogue. I decided last minute however that Inquiry II Option 3 was my favorite… The only thing I didn’t like with the inquiry was the lack of direction of the stereotypes. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to openly identify the stereotype, have a character say or do something based on the stereotype, or simply have characters converse about stereotypes in a general way but speak with bias. I …develop[ed] two characters with a certain stereotype and ha[d] the characters show one another that they are not so different. Ultimately, I was pleased with my contribution (specifically the section where Mark and Colt first meet). I believed the strength of this interaction was the fact that it seemed believable…A problem in college that most of us were all faced with when first moved in was living with a stranger. I believe my piece was able to sort of clash two different types of people with each other and break down barriers with them to accomplish two people really leaving themselves vulnerable with sharing deep sentiments with one another. (JN)

John briefly takes the reader through his decision And this is so difficult to making process before focusing on where he had accomplish when asking students to work in groups. I think students trouble in the beginning of his piece. He shuffles and instructors often throw their through several different ways to approach the hands up and just let the assignment do what it is going to assignment and argues his choice—the reader should do and hope it ends soon. This keep in mind that he was working in a group—was kind of ownership of a collaborative piece and experience personal. He linked a personal experience he has had is as productive as I have managed with one his community would understand (trouble to make collaborative work. with a roommate), in order to display the intricacies of vulnerability. For John, the ultimate

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purpose of his piece is to show that deep sentiments are shared through vulnerability, and that this vulnerability is often only accomplished through the “break down” of barriers that are externally and internally maintained. John was one of many students that made connections from the assignment, to the course, to his own experiences at the university, and then back to the assignments: A process that became more explicit as time went on in ENG 112 during the spring semester. At the end of the course, John shares many of the same sentiments present in his inquiry II writer’s memo in his letter to future students, when he discusses how the course works on a broader scale. John argues, “While from time to time papers may seem broad, if you take a deep breath and truly read the Inquiry page, you will find you have multiple formats for each assignment. This was my favorite part of Jose’s class, he allows you to really be innovative when it comes to structuring an assignment you want to make.” So while John initially had a problem with how broadly the students designed the assignments, he eventually sees the “multiple formats” as the primary strength of the course, where students, not the instructor, are responsible for structuring and making the work “innovative.” At the end of his letter, John cautions the students to use this new found freedom to their advantage, as he again moves from the assignments to individual contribution, to community responsibility. “Lastly, don’t just go to class; speak up. In our democratic society, we have the John is asking us to turn our attention to instability as a site of great right of freedom of speech so don’t let that go to productivity. The broad waste…If you are passionate enough about class or a assignment that might render the project unstable then becomes a certain subject in general, showing it from your site of work, producing a space, perspective can truly help your fellow students of conditions even, where he can produce writing. I would like to different backgrounds learn something from your think that this would also translate perspective.” Here, as John echoes his inquiry II memo, to the classroom as a whole. Asking students to speak in class is he asks students to share issues from their own proposing that the classroom is an perspectives in order to foster learning on a classroom unstable place where we have to collectively work to produce scale for people of multiple backgrounds. John, as the something. There are few givens in reader can see by comparing the writer’s memo with the an assignment or classroom that demands that we make a specific letter, is calling for the vulnerability that he pegs in his effort to make this a place we all inquiry II assignment to be the main way students have to navigate. interact with the course, and one another, as a whole.

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I am not arguing, nor do I think John’s and the other students’ work supports, that critical thinking takes place when a student moves from assignment, to personal contribution, to society. Rather, I am arguing that for John, and the other students, these three ways of making meaning (from assignment, to personal stake, to social impact) and focusing ideas of being are always inextricably tied to one another in the purposeful play of the classroom—a purposeful play John believes is concretely tied to the ways students take control of the spaces that are available, kairotic ways the folk shape the classroom nomos. The control that students took of the classroom, and the ways in which this control had the power to affect the nomos is particularly evident in the letters many of the students wrote for their future peers. One student, Amber, in speaking of the course, argues that José’s class is unlike any other course she has ever had and she encourages future students to take advantage of this boon: Welcome to English 112 this semester! You will quickly learn that this class will be one of the most thought provoking, challenging, and eye opening learning experiences thus far. It is definitely not one of those boring English classes most of us dread going to. Class begins daily with open discussion about many different topics that can always be tied back into our learning. As a student in the course, you will quickly learn to speak up, speak your mind, share your opinion, become engaged, and learn as an active participator rather than observer. After quickly welcoming the students, Amber moves to argue that the work students complete will be challenging and that the discussions the students engage in will be “open” and directly link back to “our learning.” Her invocation of the “our” here suggests that she sees herself as part of the group she is speaking to, placing her inside the folk community of the future students. She next admonishes the group to actively participate through her repetition of “you” and “your.” After solidifying her place as a folk member, Amber next challenges the future students to change the nomoi of their behavior, in her discussion of the coursework. [My group] created a project [in which] group members will create a scene in which they will explore stereotypes, its effects, and misconceptions…For this assignment, students must be open minded and willing to explore outside of their own comfort zone. It will be challenging at first and maybe even a little scary to do but well worth it in the end. In relation to my experience with an assignment very similar to this, I did something that

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was comfortable to me and I now wish I would have ventured out a little bit more. I challenge you to write a scene about something not so easy or similar to your own experiences. This assignment should definitely positively affect your participation with future writing assignments. It not only explores new ideas and cultures but teaches the student to not be so afraid and try something new! I guarantee if you walk into this with no boundaries you will come out of it having learned so much more than you ever thought you would. (emphasis mine) In the above excerpt, Amber links her new assignment with the opportunity to be “open,” to “explore,” and to be “challenged.” Amber reveals that as a student she “did something that was comfortable” and tries to encourage future students to change the nomoi through which students generally approach assignments (in her opinion) by challenging them to write about “something not so easy or similar.” Amber is not unlike other letter writers—some of which are present at the end of this chapter—in that her attention to the fact that the class is different directly links to encouraging future students to behave and interact differently both with José and with their peers. Amber argues that since the course is different, since it will have the greatest impact on students to date, they should take the opportunity to really challenge themselves, to change the nomoi: a challenge she has embedded in the very assignments through her active reimagining of the inquiries. The reader can see that the students that actively saw themselves as part of the folk group of students coming into the writing classroom used this positionality as an opportunity to urge those students to change, to be different, a difference demonstrated through openness, accepting challenges, and, perhaps most revealingly by Amber, to be a little scared in order to learn something new. Moving On, Moving Back April 27th, 2010, Observation Notes

This whole semester we’ve been leading up to this project. …All of the assignments you did this semester were produced by students. Consider yourself as a writer … and figure out how it is that you can manage and play with the assignment to make it work better for you as a writer. Think about the things that didn’t click with you… Go to your writer’s memo and see… what you wanted to change…

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This assignment reflects the kind of work that takes place in a composition classroom—Aurora and I worked on this assignment together. Who knows the composition process better than you do? —José

When the second semester students were given the opportunity to revise the student-created assignments with which they had worked, they continued in the direction favored by the majority of the first semester students. Both groups sought to change the assignments in ways that highlighted the connection between individual desires and student community. The appendices hold examples of the ways in which the inquiry II assignment was shifted over the course of the year. In the following section, I’ll show how students reimagined the first inquiry over time. The original inquiry I assignment José assigned in the Fall of 2009 was a “Community Manifesto”—described briefly earlier in the chapter. Over the course of this project, students were asked to think about how revolution had manifested in the alphabetic texts and media assignments they had read, watched, and listened to, and, “[T]hink about what a revolution is and the ways in which it can be manifested. Conscious of your definition of revolution, you will draft a manifesto of sorts that captures both a movement and the community that participates in this movement.” Consequently, students were asked to draft a manifesto for a movement that they themselves would see was worth fighting for—they were asked to imagine something they wanted changed in a concrete way. Below, I reproduce the complete assignment prompt as given to students. Inquiry I: Mechanisms of Community Development Purpose: We have read a few pieces, thus far in the semester, that focus on the development or reflection on communities. In order to get a better grasp of the politics of community representation, which we have briefly in class, we will develop a document that captures the essence (if that is possible) of a community. Prompt: You have read “El plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” and we have read texts that have either developed or critiqued the traditions established by this important document. Though the document captures the essence of a call for revolution (in this case a politically militant one), you will have to think about what “revolution” means in constructing your document. For this assignment, I would like you to think about what a revolution is and the ways in which it can be

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manifested. Conscious of your definition of revolution, you will draft a manifesto of sorts that captures both a movement and the community that participates in this movement. Questions to consider: What does “revolution” mean, and how are revolutions manifested? What movement/community do you represent? How will you represent it? Who are you representing? Who are you excluding through the rhetorical construction of your manifesto? How do you associate yourself with this movement? In other words, this should not be an abstract movement. Keep in mind that the closer you are associated with the movement you are representing, the better. You need to think about your rhetorical construction of the piece. What medium would more effectively capture the essence of your message/community? Requirements: Your manifesto should be 2-3 pages in length. Include a 1-2 page introspective piece that address the first three questions listed above. You will turn in a page-length writer’s memo. Your writing packet should include: Final draft Any drafts reviewed by the writing center An annotated copy of the movement/revolution research materials Copy of the definition of revolution used in your paper Through the drafting of their manifesto, José asked the students to keep the following questions in mind: “What does “revolution” mean, and how are revolutions manifested? What movement/community do you represent? How will you represent it? Who are you representing? Who are you excluding through the rhetorical construction of your manifesto? How do you associate yourself with this movement? …You need to think about your rhetorical construction of the piece. What medium would more effectively capture the essence of your message/community?” Here, José provides many narrowing questions that work to help the students imagine boundaries to keep in mind when constructing their manifesto. The language encourages students to see themselves as participants in the manifesto and the movement it represents, while the questions of exclusion, representation, and association place the assignment

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further away from an exploration of individual ideas and more on how the self, the writer, defines community. The reader can also see the layering present in all of the assignments designed by José—students must not only write a writer’s memo and manifesto, they must also provide an introspective piece that challenges the assignment and its place in the course as a whole. In the second iteration of the assignment, one created by members of the fall 2009 ENG 112 course, the students took the idea of a manifesto and community movement and reimagined the assignment as a utopian task. Appropriately, they retitled the assignment “Community Development” and focused less on a specific community and movement and more on what the students’ own ideas of a “perfect society in your opinion” were. Community Development56 Parts: -Essay -Writer’s Memo -Introspective Piece -Presentation Prompt The goal of this assignment is to design your own utopian society. This will be in the form of an essay of 3-4 pages. No one will argue that the society we live in today is perfect, and it will be your job to create one that is perfect in your opinion. You will construct this through thorough explanation of several aspects of your society. Some things you may want to address in the piece are as follows:

-What would you change about present day society to make it more functional? -What type of government would your utopian society function under? -What types of jobs would be created in your new community? -What type of educational system would be used? -How would medical treatment be administered? -How would you deal with poverty? -How would you deal with crime and punishment? -What would your community be doing to address not only the natural environment, but also the space around your particular community (other societies perhaps)? Introspective Piece

56 Student formatting has been preserved as much as possible, given the constraints of the dissertation. 160

This 1-2 page paper is going to allow you to reflect on some conceptual questions concerning the topic. You will respond to all three of the questions listed. It is recommended to answer the first question before writing your paper. This will truly help you to decide on some of the more important aspects of the society you will create. The second and third questions should be answered upon completion of your paper because they will not play as much of a role in constructing the society. -What about today’s society makes it flawed? -Realistically, why is this impossible to achieve today? -What would your individual role be in this society? This is somewhat of a carry over from the paper, but what level of responsibility would you want to give yourself in your newly created society? Writer’s Memo This will be a 1 page reflection of your experience writing the paper. Answer the following questions, and also include anything else you feel compelled to that is related to the assignment as a whole. -What were your feelings on this assignment from beginning to end? -What was your approach to working on this assignment? -What grade do you think you deserve? Presentation You will present your society to the class. This will mostly be an informal presentation, but your goal will be to sell your society to your classmates. Once all of the presentations are done in class, a vote will be taken on which society is favored most in class (you will not be allowed to vote for your own society). The society that receives the most votes will get 3 extra credit points on the assignment. The students concentrated the assignment on the following questions: “What would you change about present day society to make it more functional? What type of government would your utopian society function under? What types of jobs would be created in your new community? What type of educational system would be used? How would medical treatment be administered? How would you deal with poverty? How would you deal with crime and punishment? What would your community be doing to address not only the natural environment, but also the space around your particular community (other societies perhaps)?” So while the

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initial assignment had a narrower focus (through the use of words “manifesto” and “community movement”) and a broader scope in the questions (through ideas of definition), the second assignment has a broader initial focus (constructing an entire society) with narrower questions (through questions of government, jobs, education, and medicine). Caleb, one of the students to work on the assignment, explains why his group chose to shift the assignment. “[T]he way we constructed it gives each student a better way to explore the important aspects of society. I am hoping that completing our assignment first will give students a more gradual entry into the other assignments that aren’t nearly as focused.” So, Caleb and his group mates refigured the task to provide future students a smoother entry into the rest of the curricula in ENG 112. Caleb doesn’t see his group’s assignment functioning in isolation, rather he sees it in play with the rest of the course—a play that will become increasingly open and inventive, a play many students might not be ready for Reading these now is so insightful. at the beginning of the course. Caleb sees himself in Earlier I mentioned that students are the ones who know more than the unique position of knowing a “better way” to ourselves what might work for explore “the important aspects of society.” Like them in the long run. Here, I am thinking about how removed Amber, he is within the folk and uses this positionality instructors sometimes are from the to provide a gentler entry into the challenging role of student. It has been years since I was a first year student. As assignments he believes are placed further on a graduate student and instructor, throughout the course. And perhaps most noteworthy is especially earlier on, I was just eager to jump in. This is what you the refocus on the students’ own ideas—José’s don’t get in standardized assignment asks for them to “capture a movement and feedback—a concrete piece of feedback that tells you what they the community that participates in that movement,” want and need out of a class. while the students work to highlight “your opinion” (emphasis mine). Moving from articles to personal pronouns shifts the ideas onto the students’ shoulders, into their worlds—again, a direct shift that calls attention to the folk as a body within the course as well as the nomoi though which this group might approach an assignment. And while this focus on the personal would not be eradicated in the third iteration of the assignment, the purposes would again change as students sought to reimagine what utopia could be. When the second semester students took on changing the inquiry I assignment, the “Mechanisms of Community Development” assignment, yet again, they returned to the utopian theme through the doorway of the “mandate” that characterized the manifesto work.

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Inquiry 1: Your idea of a Utopia Purpose: In terms of your responsibilities in American society, we are obligated to be active forces in our democratic political structure. Throughout our lives, we each see parts of our society that are flawed and work towards programs to help these people or groups out. What this assignment presents is a unique scenario, it allows you as a student to channel everything you love or hate about our society today and speak up. After you read El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán and Universal human values: finding an ethical common ground, you are asked to develop a mandate to develop and truly create a utopian society. For part one of the assignment, you are asked to create a 4-5 pg mandate. After this, you will be asked to write a 2-3 pg introspective piece as a group to identify the challenges of the project. Finally, you will then write a 1 pg writers memo to describe your experience from working as a group.

Consider the following terms when creating your assignment: Utopia – A society free from the constraints of poverty, oppression, and other social injustices that result from the imperfection of our society.

Perfection – The ability or quality of something to be truly free from any type of characteristic that would give it any conflicts.

Culture – A person or society who is connected with a specific type or group of people through connections in literature, art, music, and different mannerisms.

Discrimination – Detrimental treatment or oppression of a specific individual or group of individuals based on prejudices developed of their culture.

Community – The sense of connection between a group of individuals through some unique characteristic that is evident amongst every individual of a group.

Part I: Utopian Mandate Structure your mandate around the assigned readings and the following questions: How would you describe a truly utopian society and what key characteristics should be included?

After reading El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan, what characteristics would you say your utopia embodies and how will you go about implementing them?

In terms of the creation of your society, will you start it in a new country or through existing land you want in a coup?

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Do you think it is right to allow certain people to be a part of the society and to exclude others? If so, why?

What sorts of opportunities and advancements will be available to citizens of your society that have been previously oppressed?

Part II: Introspective Piece

Reflecting again on your readings and assignments, consider the following:

Do you think you should have rules-based institutions in your society? If so, who has the right to make these rules and enforce them?

After reading Universal Human Values, what values does your group believe apply to all societs?

To what extent is oppression evident in our everyday society and what can you do as an individual to oppose or stop it?

When creating your particular mandate, what type of language did you use and why did you feel it was important?

Part III: Writer’s Memo Consider the following: What challenges and obstacles did you find with this project?

Where you challenged at all by the ability to work as a group? If so, why?

Were there any parts of the brainstorming you felt difficult, specifically differing ideas of universal human values?

The assignment calls for students to “channel everything you love or hate about our society today and speak up. After you read El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán and Universal human values: finding an ethical common ground, you are asked to develop a mandate to develop and truly create a utopian society.” So while the assignment maintained its open nature through the focus on utopia, it was again further contextualized through the readings the students would complete 164

around the inquiry. Students also provided simple, one-sentence definitions for the words “Utopia,” “Perfection,” “Culture,” “Discrimination,” and “Community” before moving into the questions they wished for future students to focus their assignments around: “How would you describe a truly utopian society and what key characteristics should be included? After reading El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan, what characteristics would you say your utopia embodies and how will you go about implementing them? In terms of the creation of your society, will you start it in a new country or through existing land you want in a coup? Do you think it is right to allow certain people to be a part of the society and to exclude others? If so, why? What sorts of opportunities and advancements will be available to citizens of your society that have been previously oppressed?” The definitions and guiding questions work to provide the assignment with another layer of complexity. Now, as students work to create their utopia (again highlighted as personal through the inclusion of pronouns, note the high use of “your”), they will be encouraged to use provided key terms, and to complicate their own ideas through the texts they have read. Not only did the students provide definitions of guiding words and contextualize the assignment through the readings the students would complete, they also pushed the issues of discrimination, oppression, and exclusion, instead of belonging, to the fore. One of the concerns central to the group that created In reimagining the project, they are looking at the works we read in the new assignment was the logistics of the class collectively. Of course, in the implementation of a utopia, logistics that they found timeline of the course, students would not have read The People of lacking in the initial student assignment. So while the Paper by the time they draft their focus on individuation remains in inquiry I, the letters first project. This both provides good feedback on the ways the produced for future students argue that, “While my texts worked together in the class, group and I felt that describing a utopia was a good and it even makes me think that they might envision a different assignment, we truly want to see logistically how you reading order for the texts we use would create your perfect society. While reading in class. assigned readings like El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan, Universal Human Values, and People of the Paper, we also wanted you to develop your own sort of universal values amongst your group. Think of writing your paper as the novel People of the Paper; think of yourself as Saturn and you can control peoples’ lives as you please. That being said, use this ability to structure your utopia and make what your group believes is best for not just society but for the world.” So while the dream of perfection might categorize the angle with

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which the past students had changed the manifesto assignment, this iteration calls for control, specifics, and structure. Again, the reader can note the high use of the personal through phrases such as “your paper,” “you please,” and “your utopia.” And while the evolution of inquiry one from semester to semester clearly demonstrates how folksonomic assignments designed by students have the ability to invite complexity and grounding into work, as students complete, rehash and refigure assignments created by their peers, the second letter attached to this specific assignment more interestingly demonstrates how the boundary between the roles of teacher and student are collapsed when introduced to this type of work. Mark, not a particularly vocal, or overtly passionate, student throughout the duration of the course, goes so far as to place himself in the driver’s seat, not of his current course, but the course of the future through his knowledge that “everybody knows when a student is not into an assignment, the work suffers.” Below, in his letter to future students, Mark talks about the utopian assignment he created with his partner. His text moves from general critique to open advice, where the role he has as a student then morphs into something entirely more complex and nuanced. We explored the flaws of our society today and how we all have a social responsibility to work towards a better society. We had our students examine what they like and don’t like about our current American society and explore those imperfections more closely so that we can see the roots of these problems and create solutions for them. Knowledge I would impart on my students regarding my reconfigured inquiry would be having an open mind. Look at this project as a way to get your concerns and frustrations out about the society we are all apart of today. If the students doing this assignment embrace it and actually explore further the root problems they will come out of this experience with a more refined world view. I think I could encourage my students to enter this assignment in a reconfigurative and reflective relationship with this new assignment by getting them into a social action state of mind. I think if these students get passionate about this project the work will be better and more informative and diverse. (emphasis mine) Mark argues for a “reconfigurative” and “reflective” relationship characterized by passion that will “refine” the students’ “world view.” His letter seems to invoke a tripartite idea of self. He moves from a discussion where he and his partner explored the ideas of societal flaws and social responsibility as students, imparting those ideas into the new assignment, to a discussion of “his

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future students” where he invokes an image of himself as teacher, before then sliding into the community of students by speaking to them directly in the center of the letter in the section of text I’ve italicized. Mark is a student who has explored the development of society; he is a teacher, with something to impart to the future, in a tangible and exciting way through the assignment; and he is a future student, one with sage advice for his peers regarding frustration, society, and schoolwork. Mark both does and does not see himself here as (a)part of the assignment he and his partner wrote. The assignment was “theirs,” the students are “his,” and the work is for the “future”—work that is fluid, in its reconfigurative and reflective nature. Mark argues for a passionate play. Overall, the assignments, reflections, and letters show the students actively engaging in the process of classroom creation and maintenance through the folksonomic project. In critical and concrete ways, students responded to the past students, highlighted issues they found in assignments, and through their own work attempted to clarify and further strengthen the assignments for future students. It’s clear that the students took this process on in personal ways that then placed the emphasis of the course on redressing the nomoi in a community of which they felt a part, as they argue through personal pronouns and call out the uses of the assignments for other folk. So, yes. Folksonomy is messy, difficult, and at times frustrating beyond belief. However, it is also worth “it.” Worth the trouble, worth the fight. Folksonomy returns the folk to the group, returns the nomos to the work, returns the kairos to the work. Folksonomy both is and is not akin to the group work assigned in most writing classes—digital or not.

Educators know why students do group work in One of the things I really took classes—we assign it. Frequently this work is away from seeing students do this is the unassigned revision that they accompanied by frustration on the parts of both educator engaged in. In addition to and educated. As a teacher, I often ask students to reimagining assignments, they reimagined the role of teacher. I complete small impromptu presentations, in-class think their final letters really spoke writing exercises, and even major composition projects to me in a way that made me think, “This is a moment where students in groups. Some students do the work, others don’t. are telling me the kind of teacher Some students like to work together, others don’t. they want or need.” It seems like they were in some ways suggesting Successful group work, in my experience, is very hit or specific pedagogical approaches to miss, no matter who decides what students will work in pair up with their revised assignments. what groups. Group work, unlike solo projects, often is

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harder, takes longer, and everyone is a bit exhausted with one another when it’s over. Consequently, the uneven participation—or forced evenness of participation through instructor policing—that can occur in group work often removes some of the joy integral to creating in complex ways with others. Yet, José and I, through our own folksonomic partnership, backed away from control, from policing, and the students took up the reigns. Group work, as it’s typically constructed in face-to-face and online classrooms, for all intents and purposes, seems almost antithetical to folksonomy because it feels exactly like what we call it—work. Folksonomic projects, although they might make use of many of the same genre conventions as group work, as the students in all of the semesters worked together to create new patterns of knowledge that they then presented to their community for edification and learning, is considered by and large to be play, to be fun, but ultimately to matter to contributors. Different students collaborated on the folksonomic assignments for largely not-for-profit (or minimum profit) reasons, a concept pretty antithetical to most classwork ventures. While students are very savvy educational community members, who recognize the arbitrary nature of most grading schemata, the large majority of students worked beyond individual contribution for completion— focusing on the sum of the experience rather than the parts (like Mark). Consequently, without much monetary or personal gain, most contributors operated for the group rather than for the self, for the community. Before attending classes with José, before we experimented with the folksonomic project, most of my experiences with group work did not indicate that students really cared about what they were giving the group, as much as they cared about completing the task satisfactorily for their own grade. As the teacher in these situations, I forwarded this disconnect between what I was trying to teach (working together to be smart and engaged) and what I was grading on (individual contribution and group polish)— I focused too much on whether or not projects were completed “equally” by all members to the specifications of the assignment sheet. Although students together came up with amazing and innovative work, when the class was over, the projects were finished. The assignments did not live beyond the extended moment each class shared. Looking back, it all seems a little bloodless and I believe demonstrates a lack of kairos as the students and I labored toward a finite goal. This finite goal suffered from work being ripped from useful play—from community innovation. In the end, the work of the group did not build

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on a sustained community that the students identified with as a growing, living body of knowledge. Previous to, and during, the study José interacted with his courses in much the same way as Ira Shor and Paul Kameen advocate. Like Shor, he encouraged students to shape how and when the assignments, readings, and the materials that were attached to them through scaffolding were delivered and completed. For two examples, one low and the other high stakes, José would often use Facebook to ask students to vote on how much they would read and what the most interesting questions about the material were that they’d like to discuss; throughout his courses, José and the students negotiate grades together. At the end of the semester, José individually meets with all of his students to discuss what they learned, how much effort the put into the course, and ultimately what they feel they deserve in relation to a five letter grade scale. Like Kameen, José also would assign readings to himself and his students that he had not read—José believed evening out the playing field in relation to first reactions to written work, and an exploration of those works, helped show students that learning didn’t stop, teachers don’t know everything, and we all have something to offer when reading, to name just a few of the reasons. In other words, the daily environment the students were exposed to was based in critical pedagogy, and highlighted by works delving into race, class, and gender issues. And every major inquiry completed by the students included the actual project they completed, a writer’s memo detailing how they fulfilled the assignment requirements, and an introspective work that delved into what the writer thought about the assignment and the composing process in relation to their identity as a writer—as a learner in process. José made himself available to students as they This is an interesting phrase. It really, I think, brings to the forefront what I want students to consider in my classes, specifically the ones you discuss in this chapter. As a “university representative,” the teacher has an interesting relationship with the institution. We are representing something, but in other ways we are being represented (instructed on how to teach, what we are supposed to teach). I guess what I am saying is that the university is sometimes not concerned with the teacher representing him/herself. Rather, it depends on us yielding to the kind of representation it needs from us, which ultimately imposes a particular student-teacher dynamic. I might be rambling, but something to consider is how often we embody the kind of reclamation of representation we ask our students to engage in. We tell them, “You have authority!” or “Take charge of your own work!” (i.e. take on the power to represent yourself as an active learner). But how often do we, as teachers, turn to the authority that hovers over us and speak to it to represent ourselves? I suppose what I am saying is that a folksonomic classroom practice necessitates parties that carefully engage in taking on the power to represent themselves. It’s a radical enterprise.

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completed this work—offering his expertise and keeping them on task through his role as university representative. Which, in turn, takes me to one of the most surprising but hopeful moments I believe I can actually communicate with some knowledge. José and I discovered that “going it alone” in CFF might be a small academic death (at least at first); and conversely, if (especially new) instructors are already going it alone without at least strains of CFF pedagogy, they might have already felt a bit of an academic death. Because when confronted with issues of sex, age, race, and class, new instructors may feel particularly vulnerable and at a loss in regards to responding to these issues in ways that move the discussion past finger pointing and into a place and space where change might take shape. Critical Pedagogy Coalitions March 30th, 2010, Observation Notes

José: Maybe try something that’s an unconventional stereotype?

Student: Like a black guy who’s smart, or something?

José: Did you just say that?

[Two students watching, both visibly uncomfortable. One whistles in disgust.]

Student: No [cajoling]. I don’t want to come off as racist or anything. I’m just trying to give us ideas of stereotypes we don’t see very often.

José: Well, why do you think that’s unconventional? That might be interesting to explore in your introspective piece.

Critical pedagogies, of all pedagogies, lend themselves to folksonomy. Critical pedagogies urge educators to evaluate their own learning, systems of understanding, and education standpoints right alongside students. The I still think having more than one person at the “head of the class” allatonceness inherent to critical pedagogy, then, was integral to how this worked. encourages teachers to seek out disruptive The very fact that there was more than one non-student in the communities of their own as they work with students. classroom helped break down the A willingness to take chances, to be unsure, to rest in way authority was perceived in the classroom. disbelief, is essential to CCF. And, perhaps, the bravery necessary to take those chances is most often conferred to those active in supportive

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critical communities. Consequently, for good or ill, just as the students had one another, José and I had one another; our relationship ended up being integral to the completion of the CFF pedagogy as the year went on. José and I couldn’t believe how night and day the courses were from one semester to another, in regards to how students would enter into discussions on topics focused on race, class, and gender. During the study, José and I were struck by the openness of the first semester students in discussing their own ideas of race, class, and gender—and how these issues twined together with their college experiences on a daily basis. To name just one conversation, before ENG 112 class one day in November of 2009, a black woman shared that her white roommate’s curiosity about her hair had led her to the following premise and conclusion: white people without a lot of experiences with different peoples and cultures overthink stupid things (like hair differences), that then make them do rude things (like ask multiple times on multiple occasions what their black roommate’s hair products do), resulting in racist behaviors (regardless as to their intentions), reinforcing the cultural divides on campus. After laying out her argument, she then turned to me, and asked me, as a white female on campus, whether or not I thought that was true.

The very fact that bodies that The reader will remember that I was an observer occupy the classroom space are and researcher in the course, but not a formal serving in different capacities, ones that are not even typical of the participant. And while the conversation on race and composition classroom, sets the social behavior started before José arrived, it continued tone for a multi-dimensional identity as a classroom participant. into the first ten minutes of the course, with Latino/a, I wonder if students would shift Black, and White respondents. Eventually the dialogue their understandings of being students if other identities in the then turned to link up to the discussion of other classroom are not already being students’ own experiences with race and how that contested. connected to the work of the course. This was not the first time during the first semester courses that students openly sought my opinion on race, gender, and class topics nor would it be the last. Including an outsider, starting conversations before class that dealt with significant issues, revealing hurtful narratives to investigate campus- wide problems directly affecting the students, and even prolonging class until others had a chance to contribute—all of these behaviors demonstrate a willingness to sustain discussions that are often very difficult for students to enter into without becoming combative or shutting down

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during times of disagreement. The second semester students, as a group, were not as willing to enter into non-combative discussions of race, gender, and class. April sixth was just one of the days that the proverbial shit hit the fan during the second semester course. In a discussion about cultural expectations and the ways in which norming controls choices, a student brought up and wholeheartedly showed support for the American bootstraps narrative—a discussion point that the other students did not take up, for or against. In order to generate more discussion, José shared some of his own difficulties as a man of color at Miami University and also related that he missed Mexico and believed it to be a better country than the United States in some respects. After a dot of silence, more than one student leaned heatedly forward and responded by telling José that if he didn’t like the way things in America were run that he could “just go back to Mexico, then.” José maintained his composure, responding with, “It’s not that easy,” before going on to explain the difficulties of traversing the physical and academic boundaries amongst himself, his extended family, and the social constructs making up their lives. The students listened for a minute or two before beginning to speak over José, and over one another, almost shouting different variations of their original claim—that if José did not like America, he should leave it. That he should be thankful for his opportunities. Eventually they lost their steam under José’s listening silence, and he turned the conversation to other talking points the students had I remember this moment fondly. I brought up at the beginning of class that day. feel like oftentimes I try to convince myself that they do After the class ended, one of the very vocal understand the complexity of the students approached José and with a look of concern issues we discuss. But when the student showed that enough said, “I hope you didn’t take what we were saying concern was produced to make this personally. That’s not what I meant.” José nodded to statement, I felt like the wheels were turning. The issues at hand the student and they left satisfied. The room emptied are in fact complex enough that out and José and I packed up slowly. As soon as the positions need to be reconsidered. last student had left, and the doors were shut, I turned to him and said, “That was crazy racist. Should I have jumped in? I’m so sorry.” José smiled, seemed to relax, and said, “No, no, I was fine. Just knowing you’re here reminds me that I’m not insane.” And so we were for the majority of the semester. José brought in material about the School of the Americas—several students argued it should stay open despite educating multiple dictators. José asked students about the local beating of a drag queen—some students believed he might have deserved it. One of the

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only students of color in the room did not read himself as a person of color and argued that it was only fair to mark “Caucasian” on all formal documents; otherwise, you received an unfair advantage. José and I spoke about the forceful way students chose to engage in argument on the difficult days after class and in our taped conversations. And while José was not silent about his opinions during the course, he too showed passion, showed the students his frustration with the ways they were communicating, he allowed students the space to work out their own ideas in relation to these difficult issues. The fact that the second semester students felt free to oppose José’s ideas over and over again suggests that he managed to maintain a careful balancing act between pushing them to see alternative views while at the same time allowing them to find their own ways through the materials. Some of the balance José needed, he and I would soon trace to the relationship we developed with one another over the course of the study. Here is an excerpt from a conversation we had near week three of the semester. In it, José talks about his initial fears about my presence in the room and how things have changed since the first day. He relates the change in his feelings to the conversational space we began to keep early on in, and throughout the duration of, the study. I love you being there. Because when I [first talked] to people about how the class is going, I think, “Aurora’s there and she’s typing away and I’m so mortified that these [notes] are going to make themselves, make their way to some kind of weird [pause]. [A]t first, I [thought], “I don’t know what’s going on with the typing,” and I’d feel self- conscious about myself, but I think that you’ve made it very comfortable, by stepping in or by talking to me afterward. I think that as a person who’s in the classroom, you’ve really set up this comfortable setting by not [pause]. I mean, if we didn’t talk about the class afterward in those minutes where we’re packing, I’d feel like, “What the hell is going on? What is she doing?” … So, I’m very comfortable. I thought I would be a little more worried, [b]ut surprisingly, “Oh, it’s awesome.” You’re not just sitting there like [motions being judgmental], “Oh, I cannot believe that he said that!” I’ve never gotten a very weird, dirty look, “I can’t believe he said that,” or “Why is he doing this?” When I first began taking notes of what was going on in the room, José would turn and look at me frequently, especially when he or the students said something that made them vulnerable to the whole class. And as his comments above indicate, although my presence in the classroom

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was not as nerve-wracking as he thought it might be, Something I think is important to his continued circling of his own anxiety when he remember is that this pedagogical practice is often as uncomfortable talked about how he felt about my presence in the for the instructor as it is for the course indicated to me at the time that I needed to do student. As you have noted, things worked out differently for each more to assuage any residual angst I was causing by class, so the instructor has to be my presence. So, in addition to making sure I was willing to engage with discomfort. Part of this project is making always available to talk with José whenever he might ourselves as instructors vulnerable wish, I also made an effort to cut down on the noise I by changing the dynamics of authority in the classroom. made while typing—so I wouldn’t be such a distraction to the rhythm of the course—and I tried to have more low stakes conversations with the students in the course, so that any upset they might feel about a stranger in the course might be lessoned. As time went on, although there was a slight period of re-acclimation when second semester began, the looks became less frequent and I was jumping into the class space more as a participant than strictly as an observer. During the second semester, I tried especially hard to keep in mind what José had revealed earlier—that my interference actually made him more, not less, comfortable with my presence. I tried to rest in that space of listener, friend, and As I mentioned earlier, I think that colleague, for everyone in the room. Much like first the role of “stranger” or of the “other person in the classroom” semester, but with greater frequency during the second, helps show students that they are I’d joke with the students both before and after classes, not the only ones whose roles are being redefined. I know that this is and I’d chime in like a student during conversations, probably not the way that this can asking questions and offering my opinion. And, during always work given the way classes are set up (one instructor, as many the second semester, I would also help with projects students as the institution thinks moreso than I did in the first. For example, some of the they can get away with putting in the classroom). I would even say students decided to do websites for the first major that being alone in the classroom project, and as assistant coordinator for our Digital has made it more difficult to continue this kind of dynamic. I Writing Collaborative I knew quite a bit about them and think when I try this again, I will made myself available more as a writing and technology have to commit to a team-teaching agreement of sorts. consultant than as teacher or peer. My presence as researcher, joker, helper, and observer continued to evolve with José and the students as time went one.

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Eventually, José and I both felt as if my presence Of course! I think presenting was not just tolerable, or even helpful (as in the first options to students like digital semester courses), but needed (as José and the projects helped to show them that there is a lot I am not good at. You students’ relationships with one another second stepped in, and often they knew semester continued to change and grow). By more about technology than I could ever offer them. Though it breaking down the boundaries of the roles available might sound like I am trying to in the classroom space, where José was the instructor excuse my own ignorance, I think it creates a productive disruption in and they were the students and those were the only their image of teachers as all- opportunities to speak, to act, I became authorized in knowing. a different way and so did the students. During the second semester, especially as they realized that so much of the course depended on their participation and that they would eventually be creating the assignments that future students would do, the students seemed to approach the openness of the class with a fair amount of confusion. Yet as José continued to allow the students to shape the course, to trust, to give voice to their concerns, ideas, and beliefs, even if he disagreed with them, they were more open with their opinions, their wants. Unfortunately, at times, their mutual disbelief and the power they wielded kept them from being as productive as possible. As I said in one of José’s and my taped conversations, seven weeks into the semester: I think just for their age group and the section of society they are, I’ve found that it is difficult for students to take on a role of authority in [the classroom] and that frequently…that authority comes out very playfully, because they’re not really sure what to do with it. They end up almost, not all of them but some of them end up, enacting this playful dismissiveness. Of, “This is kind of a waste of my time.” Because they feel like, maybe for one of the first times, well I think it’s clear that it’s one of their beginning times of being able to say what they want, because they handle it usually poorly. But I think that we together, and through this project, that’s one of the purposes. How do we all help each other, right? How do I help you with your teaching, so you don’t feel burdened by a project? And, how do you help me be a smarter researcher? And, how do we both help the students think about things that will be productive for them? And at the same time, how do the students change our ideas about what is productive based on their own experiences, right?

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Over time, it became clear to José and me that the mutual disbelief that occurred on the part of the students, the “playful dismissiveness” I linked to the newness of the experience, largely related to issues that would paint positions of authority as racist, sexist, or classist. At these times, students would actively resist these materials in one of two ways. More vocal students would make the assertion (in various guises) that José, as a man of color, must have misunderstood the intentions, or misappropriated the materials he allowed the students to investigate. Less vocal students would note their disbelief through their body language—by making faces, sliding down in their chairs, or frequently checking their phones for the time and messages. Consequently, at times it was a play that most students take up when dealing with uncomfortable topics (with a physicality akin to how children, no matter the age, operate with chastising parents), and at other times it was simply racist. But whatever the behavior or verbal cues, it was clear to us both that José was not authorized with any regularity by the students to make claims about these topics that could be seen as “truth.” José believed that many of these actions could be traced back to one central element he’d found elusive in terms of “dynamic” with the students during the second semester of the study. [T]o a certain extent, I think it has something to do with, I’m asking them to absorb a lot in terms of classroom dynamic. [T]he students, I think, are always questioning unorthodox teaching practices. Because I tell them … that a lot of it is up to them, that they have more power than I do in terms of dictating where they’re going, I think that they are just kind of hesitant and just questioning, because they don’t trust. Until they have that conversation, then I feel that they don’t trust. And even then, students say, “There is no way that this professor is going to yield that much power to me. Why would I have this power?” And I think that it’s natural for them to wonder that, because who does that? When it does happen, how much can they trust? And that’s probably the biggest step that they need to take in the class … I feel that they have been less willing to trust that this is a different classroom space then last semester’s class. Last semester’s class … halfway through [they said], “Ok, yeah, this is different.” Right? As opposed to my students this semester who I think are more, they’re still not quite accepting the fact that maybe this is a different kind of classroom. They still haven’t accepted that, or at least given it a chance in the same way the others have.

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In José’s opinion, while the first semester was willing to be vulnerable, open, to trust José’s claims about authority and power, the second semester was not. And he sees this interaction as inextricably tied to an open conversation that requires a trust in the response that the students are getting. Will the students ask, in effect, if what José is suggesting is legit? And will they believe him when he says, “Yes. I trust you. I believe in you. This is ultimately about students realizing that they are always You do get to decide.”? What’s also telling about José’s making decisions. What is at play, commentary is how he chooses to juxtapose the first I think, is where they center those decisions. Are they making their and second semester students. José argues that during decisions through writing, or are the first semester, the class trusted José much earlier on they allowing me to make decisions about their writing? and the folksonomic project thrived. In the second That’s why I think the final inquiry semester, almost until the very end, José was the one is key—they are presented with an opportunity that will give future required to be vulnerable, to give his trust, his authority, students an opportunity to re-think to a group that not only didn’t seem to want it, but the decision. Why? Because I didn’t make the decisions about the actively worked to redistribute the power, the prompt in the first place. They responsibility of the course, back onto, if not José’s don’t know who created the assignment. They just know there shoulders, than certainly the institution to which they are people who are giving them an had decided to attend. José had to be the one to assignment and letters. Suddenly, it’s harder for them to allow me to continually say, to ask, “Here is this power; here are make decisions about their writing. these ideas. What will you do with them? What do you Because they are not responding to me. They are responding to a want to do? What shall we try, together?” And with community. roughly twenty-five percent of the course left, that conversation did finally come, because of José’s patience and conscientiousness regarding the students’ needs. When given unorthodox teaching practices, I’ve discovered the response is as unique as the communities themselves. In other words, there is no telling how students will act. But, José and I did learn that, not surprisingly, race and ethnicity (and the assumptions that can accompany it, on the part of the educator and the students) has a lot to do with it in regards to our study. While the first semester courses had a much larger distribution of peoples of color and classes, the second semester course did not. And while José’s class, race, and gender background meshed well with the first semester classes’ wants and expectations, second semester’s students seemed to

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gravitate more readily to me, as an authorized speaker.57 Let me be clear, I did not step in to teach the course, nor did I ever give or grade an assignment. Students mainly spoke with José and I did not “take over” or even “guest lecture” the course at any time. However, as a white woman, I was authorized to make claims that became legitimate to the group in ways José was not. Below, José and I discuss how his ideas of my involvement in the course changed from earlier in the semester, when he was nervous, to near the end of the semester, where he saw me as an ally. José: Well, I told you last time I think, my comment was, “I’m saying all these crazy things and you’re typing.” So it made me a little nervous, but [w]hen students start pouncing at this point in the semester, and you’re there, I think [with a small smile on his face], “Whatever, if they attack me, Aurora can report them.” Me [smiling back]: That’s right. José: So, there’s some degree of comfort in the fact that, in the absence of, I hate saying this because it just posits there are different groups within the classroom and some of them are allies and some of them are not, but at the lack of a student ally, it’s good to have a fellow instructor, a colleague knowing what I’m doing is not just me trying to push their buttons … I think that it also helps students knowing that you don’t just give me the crazy look… Might make them feel like, “Ok maybe the guy isn’t completely wonky. Maybe he’s not as crazy as otherwise we might think he is.” [A]nd that’s the thing, because… and this sounds so awkward, but I’m so glad you’re white. Because [long pause] Me: Oh, because you think if I was a person of color, it’d be like, “Oh, here are two crazy, bitter people of color?” José: Yes, exactly. Because you know I remember that moment when I told them about showing that certificate [and they said], “Well everybody has to do that because you’re an instructor, or because they are paying for your school, or whatever.” Me: Right and no one has ever asked for any kind of documentation for me. José: Right and I said, “[Aurora] and I are in the same boat.” Me: My feet are on dry land and yours are still in water?

57 This may or may not agree with scholarship that posits that students of “traditional” collegiate backgrounds more aptly perform when introduced to “non-traditional” forms of instruction. 178

José: Exactly! Same boat and she was not asked for it. … Having them not interrogate that? That was the day from hell. The fact that none of them stood up to interrogate that except for [one student], who said, “Well, this is what my amazing teacher [in Women’s Studies] was doing in the classroom,” … And I was thinking, “Ok, there’s something.” But toward the end of her comment she was stepping back a little and I was like, “Y’know.” Ok, at least I’m not coming across as this crazy loon.” In several conversations, one even involving José’s own claims about the university willfully ignoring citizenship documentation they had on file so that José might be forced to physically come to the office and prove his deserving financial aid again, the students refused to believe that racism was at play unless I, too, spoke up. In the conversation in the classroom that José references above, when José argued that he was treated differently due to his status as a new citizen, the students began to question how he knew he was treated differently—he didn’t have any evidence of others being treated better, did he? I spoke up and agreed with José (i.e. No, it is not standard practice for people to have to show citizenship documentation every time they apply for financial aid). A simple, “No one has ever asked me to prove my status as a citizen,” drastically changed the tenor of the conversation. No questions as to whether or not I had actually applied to financial aid, or if I even knew of the office José was referring to. The students accepted what I said. Talk switched from whether or not there was racism in Ohio to why racist practices still existed in Ohio, starting with the female student José mentions above and then spiraling out to others in the classroom. This type of interaction between José and I, where I used my status as a white female to positively affect a discussion of race that the students seemed reluctant to engage in, of course reminded José and I of bell hooks, who talks about white anti-racist allies (see chapters one and three), but also of Jennifer Seibel Trainor and her discussion of racism in educational settings. Within Rethinking Racism, Trainor argues that racism on the part of students is less about “protecting white privilege,” an “ignorance of oppression,” or a “lack of exposure to difference,” and more about conditioned cultural responses (3). And while I do not claim enough of an in- depth understanding of the myriads of backgrounds with which students come into the university to dismiss the above three ways racism may continue to flourish in education, José’s and my time together provides one story, one moment in which racism functioned at the university. Trainor argues that in order for educators to gain a more holistic picture of racism in education,

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researchers must tell the stories of “interconnected,” “non-linear dynamics” of lived experience, in order to provide a “rhetorical construction” regarding the ways in which “emotioned beliefs” affect student responses about race (89). Consequently, by sharing these moments, José and I hope to provide a catalogue of our actions in order bring attention toward the continued need for a focus on anti-racist classroom practices, and to provide one way that teachers might better understand ways in which students, and they, too, can help work against racism in education.58 During the second semester, in order to continue on the project of a classroom engaged with a critical pedagogy that would allow students to drive the discourse on topics about which they were reading and writing, resulting in their active contribution to folksonomic assignments investigating these materials at the end of the second semester, José needed an ally in a way not required during the first semester. Without our partnership, continuing on the project would have almost certainly resulted in a collapse of the ideas we This is why I don’t think this were trying to give space to. From my perspective, as a would work if one of us when at it singlehandedly. What has teacher and a colleague of José’s, if he had been happened in the past is that working alone, I would have recommended that he take students either do not engage with the project or feel too comfortable greater control, that allowing so much freedom would and end up seeing me as a ultimately be unproductive to the goals of a 112 course. pushover, leading me to resort to giving them “the talk,” Thankfully, José and I did work together. reestablishing a very aggressive The students did come around—in fact, after this kind of authority, and disturbing the kind of work that I hope we particularly hard discussion, José took the end of the (students and I) produce in the next class period to talk to the students about how they classroom. felt the course was progressing as a whole.59 After admitting that the topics and ideas they’d been introduced to had been difficult for them to grapple with, the consensus of the room was thankfulness for José’s patience and an appreciation for the opportunity to share their thoughts without feeling the threat of a drop in their grades or the anger of the instructor. When José asked what they thought about the materials and their work in the class, there was silence for a minute or two, and then several students offered positive commentary. The first student to offer more

58 For more on the ways in which racism (dis)functions in education, see a general overview in David Wallace’s 2011 Compelled to write: Alternative rhetoric in theory and practice and Vershawn Ashanti Young’s work on “microagression” in “Momma’s Memories and the New Equality” in Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society. 59 And by “come around,” I do not mean students then agreed with everything they were shown or with which they worked. Rather, the distrust and skepticism that seemed to be fueled by fear and anger drastically reduced. 180

than “It’s near my dorm” to the delight of his peers, said, “I like that it makes us think. Some of the topics get exhausted but they are about things that people are always going to be fighting about.” This generated a lot of head nodding around the room before another student chimed in with, “I kind of like that it’s a real classroom environment. You don’t have to say what should be said, or what you’re supposed to say. The class forces us to look at things we don’t want to look at or things we don’t want to see.” The conversation continued for many minutes, students offering various opinions on the different pieces of literature that had been read, or the different writing projects they’d been exposed to before the last student pushed the conversation to a satisfying close, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s not all brown literature. It’s what we see; it’s what happens all the time; it’s a class that forces us to see what we’re doing all the time.” The room was quite for a while, as it seemed that everyone needed time to process this response, before many of the students nodded in agreement, and then we moved on to what was due for the next day. That day was the first of several wind-down conversations after hard discussions. Eventually, through José’s willingness to rest in their disbelief, to trust that they would ultimately use the authority granted to them in positive and productive ways, started to make a change in how the students approached both him and the course. The students continued contributing, in good faith that the materials in the course, the writing and reading They really did do a better job at organizing how they would help they were completing, were benefiting them and their one another than I ever do. I am learning. They seemed to begin to believe that the not as strong as some when it comes to facilitating workshop. control José offered was real, shifting the relationship But when students kind of figure he and the students had with one another. The end of out what they want to get out of the workshop and how they want the semester signaled a sea change. to offer help on their own accord, Quietly and unremarkably, after that day of they are learning to define their own needs and how to provide for allowing time for talk about expectations, trust, and other intellectual wants. But, so vulnerability, there was more negotiation and less strife. much of this is site-specific. I know I won’t always get the mix By the third inquiry (about three-quarters of the way of students that will end up at this through the semester), class was definitely still feisty, point. But I have seen it happen. I know students can do this. And I but students were taking sole responsibility for their can just try to facilitate it and see class time. They came prepared for the course more what happens. often (knowing the readings, showing interest in the

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materials, questioning one another), more students offered their opinions on topics more frequently. Really, they laughed and listened to one another with much greater regularity. José was able to spend less time talking and more time listening—in regards to class discussions, student ideas for work, and workshopping. What Now? What Then? Unlike in chapter four, where I discussed how an online CFF space was integrated into the preexisting curricula to disrupt the wise crowd, this chapter explains one way CFF theories were integrated for courses not centered on computer discourse. While chapter four attempted to disrupt the crowd, this chapter gives insight into an attempt to harness it, in order to empower students at the beginning of their college careers in ways not frequently afforded to them. José and I tried to give space to a fluid, student constructed curricula. In order to do that, we pushed the students to challenge and question how power is traditionally organized in the classroom through teacher created and implemented assignments. Power has also been at work in my own writing of this chapter. There were moments, due to their complexity, that I did not have space to fully share because I felt the pressure to maintain a coherent narrative for the reader. One student related in our interview that because of the course, she felt empowered to approach the director of her minor program and ask to redesign the curriculum for her learning goals. She was granted that option. I wondered if her experiences in José’s class led to her action? Another student said that he learned so much in the class but ultimately he felt it was worthless, because he’s not a freshmen and no one will listen to him about, nor does he have the time to redesign anything in his other courses. A student of color in the course spoke of the way the class listened—particularly giving space to her ideas, and her wants as a learner. She stated that this experience made her feel that as a black woman she had a place to speak, something that she feels is denied her in her major courses. The students in the second semester related in class and in their writer’s memos how “AWESOME!” “So great,” “Fantastic,” the assignments the first semester students wrote were—even though, in some cases, not much changed from José’s original idea. And there is the student who in interview still doesn’t believe, after being given proof, that the assignments were actually written by students, or that his assignment will ever be given to anyone, because there is no way he and his peers are smart enough, or should be trusted enough, to contribute in those ways. As the year went on, I

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found myself filled to the brim with wonderfully organic, complicated results that pushed between and after the semesters. Yet as complicated as the results might be, this chapter demonstrates that over the course of the year, students showed an active engagement with the folksonomic process and engaged with the materials in reflective and community building ways that enabled discussions and moments of power and ownership not readily available in most classroom contexts. As the chapter shows, students were engaged on several levels in the production and remediation of the assignments completed in their ENG 112 course. As one student stated in his interview, “I remember José’s class being very free…[José] wanted us to realize things for ourselves. You can’t just tell someone something and you can’t make [someone] believe just by telling them.” The students were encouraged to act as a wise crowd in order to interrogate the ways their first experiences with college constructed learning, in a large part, for them instead of with them or by them. The critique I’ve offered here, in this chapter, of play and work leading to learning only if the self sees community purpose for the work beyond the immediate goal, excites me. There are ways to help students take control, where the roles in the classroom blend and people are encouraged to stand up for their communities. I believe folksonomy to be one of those ways.

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Chapter Six The Business of the Network, Attempting to Teach, and Other Threads Ways to negotiate and enter into discussions of teacher/learner power dynamics in composition and rhetoric have a long and storied history, one I barely dip my toe in through this text. And as I have demonstrated throughout this dissertation, by combining liberatory and feminist pedagogies with wise-crowd theory and folksonomy, educators may open up the classroom in ways twenty-first century students can not only identify with, but flourish in. Crowd theory and the folksonomic projects currently inundating public web spaces make it impossible for responsible classrooms to follow prefabricated teaching templates focused on “student-centered” curricula and expect stellar results. Or, in fact, to push digital technologies into the classroom—folksonomic or not—and expect that the classroom, the way participants interact, the work that gets done, and the way the educator approaches the learning space, will be inevitably transformed by the mere presence of technology alone. As educators, we must do more than help students create “complete” texts, because to see completion as the goal blocks out the very real power dynamics at play in even the most simplistic academic texts. One of the greatest challenges when working with social networking is to approach it in a way that does not just reify current practices. Learning should be a dynamic practice, one focused on change, curiosity, complexity. And yes, I recognize that many teachers are even now experimenting with social networking in ways that move beyond the complete, clear, and concise, yet this work is still a very small fraction of the publications currently circulating in composition and rhetoric about the uses of social networking in the classroom. And, in addition, many of the publications and conference presentations that derive from such work do not consider how closely we educators wed ourselves to business when we make use of these sites and models so freely. I would like to take a moment here, at the end of this project, to further caution educators looking to try out CFF pedagogy about what exactly we require when we mandate social networking projects in online spaces. Go to YouTube.com, any page on YouTube.com, and you’ll get at least two advertisements (and that’s if you’re visiting a page without a banner at the top). Log in to the site, and the user will begin to see more ads that are tailor made for her, crafted from her viewing, tagging, posting, and voting. The same is true of almost all social networking sites—excepting few wikis, as some are maintained either through school funding or public donation. The business of the

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networks should not be overlooked by educators looking to evaluate the sites for research, or teachers asking students to complete digitized assignments. The messages are always there, cluttering, changing, and shaping the view. In fact, if you follow the confidentiality agreements of most social-networking sites for the last five to ten years, the rewrites that have occurred in the privacy policies alone should make teachers who require students to sign up or use social-networking applications in ways they would not choose to without involving class-work sit up and take notice. For example, remember the privacy policies of Facebook discussed in Chapter Two. Yet, as Peter Cheese notes in Business Week’s Netting the Net Generation, “Generation Y is highly relationship-oriented and uses a wide range of media and technology to connect with others.” And while generational claims are very reductive, the relationships that Cheese points to are often maintained in both face-to-face and online environments simultaneously, with a heavy emphasis on highly variable online social networking tools—relationships of which educators seek to take advantage when they sign in, sign-up, and log-in. Of course, combine Generation Y’s desire for high interconnectivity with some of the largest internet time sinks known to web users and you’ll arrive at some of the most diverse and popular social networking sites in America, including Twitter.com, YouTube.com, and Facebook.com (Neilsen Statistics, Mashable). While it has been argued that many of the areas in social networking sites are “public” spaces (Maranto and Barton), and most students may indeed have already signed up for and provided their personal information to many of the most popular sites, we must be careful that we not inadvertently suggest, nor require, students to release personal information that could be used to identify and profile them as users in ways with which they are not comfortable or they do not have control over. If we approach social-networking interfaces as readerly texts, instead of writerly texts, we ignore the panoptic elements of these business spaces. There is a reason that social-networking sites are flush with attention from corporate America, and it’s not because these businesses have suddenly become altruistic. In one sense, if I require my students to log in and sign up to Facebook as part of the classroom content, I might be requiring that they give away the types of information that informed IRB consent would allow them to opt out of in a classroom study. Of course, this argument is balanced by those who would contend that Facebook, and other online social networking sites, are public spaces—public spaces subject to the same constraints of other

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public arenas. Either way, every praxis has its pitfalls. This is why I would encourage educators to meld the online with the offline, in terms of public space. It’s not enough to disrupt web spaces, we must also help students fashion ways of making meaning, of disrupting, interrupting, the very physical spaces of the university. I do not think there is an easy answer to the issues inherent in the advertising and business of social networking. Yes, educators could push their administrations to build and maintain social networking applications and additional hard-drive spaces that do not rely on advertising, but this attitude seems rather pie-in-the-sky for the majority of the financially struggling academic institutions in the United States. Or, educators could allow students to “opt out” of these requirements and create coursework that would take the place of these social networking assignments. But then why have the assignments at all, if students can learn the same things without the network?60 Do we do our students a disservice, when we isolate, or direct their attention away from the rhetorical situations making up a large portion of their lives? I believe we do. Instead, I would argue that classroom use of online social-networking spaces must be as transparent as possible. Students should read, discuss, and interact with policies, such as the timeline of Facebook’s privacy statement, as coursework before, during, and after online assignments are completed. Obviously this type of interaction with policy language might significantly shift the amount of work in social-networking spaces educators are able to adequately cover with students over a given quarter or semester of instruction. And ultimately, much more research must be completed by the academic community (including assignments, texts, and conversations teachers might integrate into classroom praxis to negotiate these minefields in the classroom in timely and complex ways) in order to elucidate the very complex relationships between different corporations and these “public” spaces and applications. In an age of standardized testing, where the “proof” of student learning is demonstrated to administrators through quantitative data, backed by tightly controlled rubrics that highlight clarity, correctness, and concision, asking departments to push uncertainty forward in the classroom, especially uncertainty that is driven by the social network—not the expert—is asking quite a bit of an institution. For example, as the folksonomic space was utilized (or not) by the

60 Of course, these questions do not take on the print-based industrial complex that makes up another large facet of the corporatization of education. 187

new teachers at Miami, little was clear, correct, or concise. And what many of the new teachers appreciated most was not the archive created on the wiki space, but rather the interstitial opportunities in discussion, in the classroom together with their local, social network, that were fostered by the fragmentary nature of the wiki space. In other words, the uncertainty present in the wiki space necessitated conversations that opened up more possibilities for frank discussions regarding classroom theories and practices. One of the things I was most struck by through my work with José was how infrequently moments of critical pedagogy are related as happening in groups of educators. Most practitioners famous for their implementations of critical work are solo. Mike Rose, bell hooks, Ira Shor, to name just a few, relate narratives that rest at the margins of their social institutions—at times working in direct opposition to very real, oppressive forces. At the same time that these educators work with communities, they seem to be achingly separate from a close body of educators that hold the same ideals or goals. Why is that? Wendy Bishop once said that the only teachers’ minds you could change were those that were new; she was speaking of graduate students. What most teachers need, especially those who may be new to a discipline and a profession, and many often crave, is an experimentation space. This space should not be confined to their own classrooms, or water-cooler discussions between grading sessions. Peter Elbow was once accused of making the grading at his college more chaotic than it needed to be. His response has become my own, when teachers ask, “Yes, but what are they actually learning?” I remember that he answered that he was not making the grading more messy than it needed to be, he was merely being honest about how messy grading always inherently was. I believe the same thing about learning—I believe we need to be a lot more open about how messy, chaotic, and contradictory learning really is. And the sooner we recognize and foster these spaces of uncertainty, the more easily we will be able to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd. Of course, allowing the wise crowd control of institutional space runs entirely counter to the traditional training of most pedagogues. And difficulties with instituting folksonomy might also include resistance on the part of students. Critically involving oneself in a community of learning is a lot of work and can be frustrating—especially since many American students have been inundated with government-mandated, No Child Left Behind testing. After years of work perfecting an understanding of hierarchy through five paragraph essays and multiple-choice tests,

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folksonomy asks students and educators to radically reimagine what a classroom can be. Instead of individually smoothing out disruption and covering over lack in order to prove mastery of material, critical feminist folksonomy asks for investigation of the interstice of understanding and confusion, an attention to what is and is not. This type of work is also difficult for educators. As one of my primary educators during my master’s degree would say, “Our relationship is based on the idea that you are entirely ignorant of what you need to know.” And even after the in-depth studies I’ve done, both in and out of the classroom, regarding the wisdom of crowds, folksonomy, and critical and feminist pedagogies, I still have trouble believing that uncertain pedagogy based on folksonomic writing and learning spaces actually works. As Mike Rose argues within Lives on the Boundary, cultural fears of “internal decay, loss of order, and of diminishment weave into our assessments of literacy and scholastic achievement” (7). Folksonomy asks the educator to rest in this uncertainty—to reimagine these spaces not as decayed, or as loss, but as fertile grounds upon which knew knowledge, or at least living knowledge, can be built. Toni Morrison, in her Nobel Acceptance Speech, reminds educators that the bird, that education, community, writing itself, is resting in our hands. Whether alive or dead, it is in our hands. Do educators believe Morrison? Or, have we surrendered to the conflict Rose presents for educators—where fear of decay rules our understandings of learning, control, order, and scholastic achievement? Have we decided our response to the myriad sources of data and exploration is to imprison learners, defining them with the misery of their failures in order to taxonomically make order from chaos? I have no trouble believing the relationships between teachers and students are predicated on insurmountable ignorance on the part of both parties. As Byron Hawk argues, teachers cannot “know” students because they are not part of their discourse communities. Perhaps the opposite is also true for students. If we ask students to transgress the institutional boundaries between teachers and students, even build the tools by which they might do so with them, will they really be able to? Students may not learn what pedagogues think they need to know. No longer will instructors be able to rely on their status as experts in order to prove their worth to the community—or to order the topics taken on by classroom discourse communities. Consequently, I imagine that one of the greatest gains of using folksonomic pedagogies will also hold the greatest loss, a much needed loss, but a loss nonetheless. Because, as we

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necessarily begin to trust the crowd, we, as educators, must trust ourselves less. Or perhaps not less, but differently. We must trust that acting as collaborators, agitators, observers of the available means, will create positive local change that can, in time, ripple outward. By paying attention to the uncertainties interstitially located in socially networked, folksonomically driven communities, educators may gain insight into the myriad and complex ways highly disparate folk can enact critical thinking and doing which moves beyond the expert—whether or not these attempts are “successful,” whether or not they are “wise,” looking instead to simply allow these attempts to exist, to question with, alongside, instead of against perceived “ignorance.”

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Appendix A: Syllabus for 731, 698, and 699

Catalog Descriptions

ENG 731 Theory and Practice of Teaching Composition (4) Examination and evaluation of current methods and strategies for teaching college writing with emphasis on classroom application of composition theory and research. Major topics include composing process, invention, argumentation, sentence and paragraph, testing and evaluation, recent research in composition, reading and writing, and composition and literature. Summer only.

ENG 698, ENG 699 Workshop in the Teaching of Writing (2, 2) Required of new graduate assistants. Separate sections for graduate assistants teaching Freshman English and ENG 313 or 315. Sections are coordinated with the courses students are involved in as teachers or readers. Deals with practical problems involved in teaching freshman or professional writing. Offered on credit/no-credit basis. Credit does not count toward graduate degree. Prerequisite: graduate standing and award of graduate assistantship or teaching associateship.

Goals of ENG 731, ENG 698, ENG 699

• Immediate and Practical: To help you prepare for effectively teaching ENG 111 (in the fall) and ENG 112 (in the spring); to help you become an effective teacher of college composition. Focus on practice and pedagogy: WHAT you do (as a writer, as a teacher of writing) and HOW you do it.

• Long-term and Theoretical: To introduce a theoretical and philosophical framework for teaching composition — i.e., based on theory and research in rhetoric/composition — that provides a rationale for specific strategies and pedagogies for teaching writing. Focus on theory/rationale: WHY you do it a particular way (as opposed to some other way), what justifies your approach.

Required Texts

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College Composition at Miami (Volume 62, 2009) —> required for ENG 111/112 students, provided for instructors Writing and Place: Critical Spaces for Composing (6th Edition, 2009) —> required for ENG 111 students, provided for instructors The Everyday Writer (4th edition, 2009) —> required for ENG 111/112 students, provided for instructors Miami University Teacher's Guide for English 111 & 112 (Volume 62, 2010) —> provided for instructors Mali, Taylor, What Learning Leaves (2002) —> 2009 Summer Reading Program selection —> provided for instructors for possible use in ENG 112 Villanueva, Victor. Cross-Talk in Composition Theory. 2nd Ed. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2002. —> should be in bookstore or order from Amazon (or elsewhere), approximately $35 new

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Appendix B: English 112 Course Description via the English Department webpage. ENG 112 is a writing course focused on writing critically and analytically about texts — "texts" broadly defined as including literary, disciplinary, public, and popular texts; print and digital texts; and visual, video, and aural texts as well as verbal print text. The course explores the relationship between writing and reading and interrogates how knowledge and meaning are constructed through analyzing and writing about texts. Through four overlapping units, called “inquiries,” ENG 112 teaches you various tools for textual analysis with the aim of producing a new text — your own critical response to what you have read. Major Inquiries and Writing Assignments 1. Close, Critical Reading —> results in a shorter “warm-up” paper focusing on a close reading and analysis of a single complex text or artifact (what does it mean? where and how does it apply?) 2. Cultural/Historical Interrogation —> focuses on understanding texts from different perspectives in time and place and on understanding texts from the point of view of different audiences and identities (such as gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, age, class, etc.); typically results in two longer papers 3. Critical Application —> applying these various tools for textual analysis to understand a contemporary issue, problem, or scene; typically results in one longer paper 4. E-Portfolio Inquiry/Final Reflection —> reflecting on your writing and reading practices through analysis of your coursework collected in an e-portfolio; typically results in one longer paper Each inquiry is comprised of a number of components, including class activities, shorter writing assignments, drafts, peer responses, proposals, research notes, Writer’s Letter, and a major final paper or papers (or the equivalent) for each inquiry. The major final paper for each inquiry will vary in length. Inquiry #1 will result in a shorter paper (~2-4 pages). The other inquiries will result in longer papers (~4-7 pages or the equivalent). At least two of the papers will require that you integrate secondary sources of research. Each of these major projects will require an accompanying Writer’s Letter that asks you to explain your purpose and audience for each assignment; to explain your rhetorical choices and strategies; to reflect on your writing process; to describe what you did in revision, etc. The major assignment for Inquiry #4, the e-

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portfolio project, is actually an extended Writer’s Letter asking you to collect your writing and analyze it and to reflect on your writing and reading practices through the entire semester.

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Appendix C: José’s Syllabus Miami University Department of English English 112: Composition and Literature Textually Active: Rhetoric of Activism and Representation “Now, as I watched the story unfolding…I realized that when asked for relief, all I could do was offer to tell a story.” (225) from Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation by John Phillip Santos Instructor: José Course Description: While English 112 will continue to emphasize the English 111 objective of helping us develop the necessary competencies that will enable us to approach, challenge, and analyze subjects critically in writing, this course will also encourage us to playfully and vigorously approach literatures to experience stories told in voices other than our own in order to reevaluate the rhetoric we use in exploring our own narratives, arguments, and social interests. English 112, being a Miami Plan Foundation course, will support the Miami Plan goals of critical thinking, understanding of contexts, engaging with other learners, and reflection leading to action. These goals directly inform the specific objectives of this course. Throughout the course of the semester, we will think critically by approaching new theories that will challenge our traditional perception of literature and rhetorical argumentation by translating text into active social practices. We will increase our understanding of contexts by crossing the borders imposed by the conventional modes of argument, traditional literary cannon, and quotidian forms of expression. Grounded in collaborative learning, the course will encourage us to interact with each other as we handle and discuss the required and supplemental texts, thus learning from the ideas developed in and outside of the classroom. In analyzing and interacting with various texts, social conditions, and learners, the course will create an environment of reflection in which we will be able to position ourselves as writers, individuals, and scholars in relation to issues of personal and communal significance. Through the course of the semester, we will work our way through a series of critical inquiries designed to expose us to a variety of writing and reading styles, and in doing so, we

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will pay careful attention to the importance of the rhetorical elements and subjects that authors convey, readers perceive, and to which communities respond. Given the interrelatedness of the critical inquiries, we will focus our work on a central theme—“Textually Active: Rhetoric of Activism and Representation.” Pushed to see things in a global context, we often get tired of thinking of the wretched box everyone speaks of. Forget stepping out of the box! Our challenges in the 21st century are to tear apart the box (recycle it if you wish) and begin to truly position ourselves in a global community while in a local environment. In order to do so, we must seek a new understanding of the communities we live in. Consider the following questions:

Can we use the same discourses in global communities as we do in local ones? How can we localize the ongoing conversations taking place outside of the box (the box being corrugated canons, genres, styles, nationalities, time periods, etc.)? Can we use the English language to discuss global issues taking place in non-English speaking countries? What happens when international issues cross into our borders via textual representations? In doing so, are we excluding others from our conversation and thus reconstructing the box we so eagerly try to dismantle? If so, how can out cultural and textual production address this exclusion? How can we adopt alternative forms of communication that create not only third, but multiple planes that can function as spaces of negotiation where both verbal and non-verbal forms of expression can be developed? What are the silenced conversations that take place within our communities? How does textual and traditional activism establish or hinder the development of forums for such voices? How do these issues gain a voice? How can you bring these voices together? Writing, reading and critical thinking are all inextricably linked, so our coursework will focus on all three. We will foster an environment where the previously outlined inquiries can be discussed, for attempting to answer them would be not only ambitious, but also most certainly impossible. We will actively engage with the assigned texts through a variety of means including (but certainly not limited to) small group activities, in-class discussions, forum-style discussions on Facebook, and personal reflections. Short, informal writing assignments completed in class

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and as homework will ultimately lead up to the development of longer, more complex papers. Process writing will be a critical component of this course, and each student will be expected to participate in peer-review sessions, attend any required student/instructor conferences, and engage seriously with the revision processes, and participate in community and University sponsored events that allow us to translate our rhetoric into public spaces.

Required Texts:

Gaspar de Alba, Alicia. Sor Juana’s Second Dream. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1999.

González, Rigoberto. Crossing Vines. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1989. 2003.

Tobar, Héctor. The Tattooed Soldier. (1998). New York: Penguin, 2000.

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Appendix D: José’s Original Inquiry II Assignment Inquiry II: Cultural Production Purpose: After reading Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier, we might be encouraged to discuss how characters are constructed if engaged in a comparison of the characters as we meet them in the opening section of the novel and how we leave them in the last. Certainly, the characterizations of Antonio and Longoria show us, as readers, that characters themselves are complicated agents that are subject to the author, their own narratives, their contexts, and our readings of them. The purpose of this project is to analyze cultural constructions through the very means that Hector Tobar, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, and Rigoberto González have done in the pieces we have read this semester—narratives! Prompt: For this inquiry, we will explore character and cultural construction through (drum roll) constructing characters. You will compose a segment of a dialogue between at last two characters. This can be in the format of a brief narrative, an act of a play, a “This American Life” type of recording, etc. Here’s the catch, the characters must be different in at least three ways (gender, sex, race, color, religion, age, etc.). The goal here is to see how we construct people who are different than we are. Questions to consider: How do we imagine the lives of bodies other than our own? What are your initial impulses when constructing a ______character? How do you construct difference in dialogue? How do you distinguish between two different characters on paper/recording? Why are you choosing the characteristics that you are? Requirements: 4-5 page scene/dialogue (8-10 minutes of recording) Your scene must include at least two characters that are different in at least three ways. Your 2 page introspective piece should address at least two of the questions above. Your writing packet should include: Draft of your scene/dialogue Any drafts reviewed by the writing center and peers Writer’s memo Introspective piece

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Appendix E: Students Redesigned Inquiry IIs, First Semester

Assignment II: Character Dialogue (Option 1)

Prompt: For this assignment, we will explore character and cultural connections through constructing characters. You will compose an engaging dialogue between at least two characters. You may choose to construct this dialogue in a variety of ways, including in the form of a brief narrative, an act of a play, a “This American Life” type of recording, etc. Your dialogue will become dynamic by your characters having some differences (gender, sex, race, religion, age, etc.) I will leave it up to you to decide which and how many differences your characters need to make the conversation interesting and challenging. Your characters should be placed in a location where neither one is from. Also, your characters must engage in some kind of a conflict that exposes their cultural and social differences to the audience. Your goal in this assignment is to see how we view and interact with people who are different than we are.

Class Connection: After discussing in class how engaging characters often are constructed with different values and backgrounds, this is our chance to create our own dialogue. Characters are often agents through which the author can speak through, addressing mainstream issues and ideals. This is our opportunity to think about how you see cultural issues from a personal standpoint.

Questions to Consider: >How do you think cultural differences change the way we think and act? >How often are first impressions accurate? How is a person influenced by people that are different from him/herself? >Why are you choosing the characteristics that you are? >Although you are taught that stereotyping is wrong, what are the instances in which they can be helpful or useful?

Requirements: >Write a minimum 4 page dialogue (8-10 minutes of recording)

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>2 page introspective piece addressing at least two of the above questions >1 page writer’s memo

Inquiry II: Cultural Production (Option 2)

Purpose: As we have read in a number of readings this semester, characters are created as a product of their environment, both past and present. Also, we have seen how as the environment and/or the setting and/or the circumstances change, the character undergoes a change as well. The purpose of this assignment is to reflect the construction and changes of a character by creating three characters from three different environments. Prompt: As discussed above, characters, being products of their past and present environment, are intricate beings. Therefore, their environments are also very complicated. The guidelines of this assignment are as follows: You will create three different environments with a believable character in each one. These environments could be urban, suburban, rural, outer space— anything that comes to mind. After dictating these characters with a little history about them and their current status in their environment, you must place these characters in one more environment, different than the others. Based on their histories, how would these characters react to each other? Requirements:  3-5 pages in length, size 12 font, double spaced  Your paper should begin with three character introductions in three different environments in order to develop their character traits  Your paper should end with the three characters in one final environment featuring a confrontation  A one paragraph writer’s memo and page-long introspective piece addressing all of the following questions must be turned in with your paper in order to receive full credit

Questions to Consider 1. How does a character’s environment affect his or her personality, dialogue, and actions? 2. What role do stereotypes and generalizations play in the creation of your characters? 3. Why did you choose the characters that you did.

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4. How did your characters change when placed in an unfamiliar environment? Do you think these changes are realistic?

Writer’s Memo Guide: 1. What was your writing process while doing this assignment? 2. What is your opinion about the prompt? Did you like it or dislike it? What aspects did you like/hate about it? 3. If you could change anything about this assignment, what would you change? How would you change it to make it better? 4. What (if any) was your biggest struggle? Why do think you had trouble with this? 5. What did you learn from this assignment? Do you think that what you learned applies to this class?

Inquiry II: Cultural Production (Option 3)

Purpose: Throughout the semester we have discussed and exposed stereotypes and the roles that society expects and casts bodies of all different types. Undoubtedly, we have all been either subject to or even cast such stereotypes upon bodies unlike our own. The realization that stereotypes are not part of an advancing social awareness necessary for the advancement of progress. The purpose of this inquiry is to further delve into the divides in the social structure.

Questions to consider:  What stereotypes have we encountered throughout our lives?  Why and how do these stereotypes effect our development as a people?  What societal structure has allowed for these divides to arise?  Can we imagine a society without these prejudicial divides? Is this even a feasible outcome?

Introspective: Reflect upon the purpose and the questions presented above and piece together a two-page introspective piece addressing the ideas behind this inquiry.

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Prompt: For this inquiry we will explore cultural construction, specifically cultures other than our own. Create a scene involving any number of characters. This scene must address a stereotype, it’s effects, and misconceptions. However, the characters of this scene must all be notably different from yourself as a body. You must examine these stereotypes as they effect your characters’ niche in society.

Requirements:  Four to five page scene/dialogue  All the characters from your scene must be significantly different from yourself

Writer’s Memo: Reflect again on the inquiry, but this time as a whole. Has considering a segment of society other than yours and how they are perceived changed your personal perspectives? What did you think of the inquiry? How do you feel about your own work? Any other feelings or things worth mentioning.

Your Writing Packet Should Include:  Your final draft  Introspective piece and writer’s memo  Any prewriting and drafts used in your writing process

Inquiry II: Cultural Production (Option 4)

Purpose: The purpose of this assignment is to encourage how characters of differing gender, sexual orientation, race, ect. interact. It’s important not only to communicate through teacher student but to openly share your views, thoughts, and actions about cultural relations with the class. Force students to step out of their comfort zone and portray characters that are different from themselves. Prompt: We will explore how different characters interact through actions, dialogue, and appearance. In a group you will draft a short script of play that incorporates characters of

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different characteristics and how they interact. Your group will then present your play in class either through a live performance or previously filmed act.

Questions to consider: How did you feel portraying a body different then your own (different race, gender, religion, ect.)? What made you develop the character the way you did? (Example: Did you build your black character off a BET show or Obama?) How did you approach constructing characters that were outside your own “social norm”? How did you want these characters to interact with each other?

Requirements: Within your group of 3-4 people, develop a script that incorporates characters of at least 2-3 different characteristics (gender, sex, race, religion, age, ect.) Present the script through a play that you and your group will participate in. Portray your character to the best of your abilities through dress, action and dialogue. Write a 1 page introspective piece answering 2-3 of the questions to consider.

Your writing packet should include: Draft of your script Writer’s memo o What did you think of the assignment? o How did you approach it? o Did your feelings change as you worked through the project? Introspective Piece

Inquiry II: Cultural Production (Option 5) Purpose: Throughout the semester we have read literature with vastly different characters that were forced to interact and cast judgments on bodies that were different than their own. In this Cultural Production you will create a narrative that develops characters that are

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inordinately different from ourselves and our social constructs, showing their difference in a reciprocated conflict. Requirements: Minimum of two characters that have at least 1 MAJOR difference At least one scene with character dialogue 1 page introspective piece answering the following questions: What is your meaning behind writing this narrative? What role (if any) did stereotypes play in how you constructed the characters? Writing Packet: Narrative Drafts Writer’s Memo Introspective Piece

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Appendix F: Students Redesigned Inquiry II, Second Semester

Inquiry II: Cultural and Historical Interrogation (Second Semester)

Purpose: We have now read a large part of Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier which seeks to show how different characters have different perspectives on history and have different methods to record it. We have/will discuss the recovery of histories and memory but will also consider our own role in the construction of how we perceive the present and the ways in which the “past” is recorded. The purpose in this assignment is to show people that history can vary and even end up being biased depending on who it is recorded by.

Prompt: In Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier, you may notice that characters with different personalities and opinion have different perspectives on life and how it should be recorded in history. In this Assignment you will get into groups of 3 and plan out a day when you will record your day in a manner you see fit, one rule is that you all must attend something together at the same time. After the day has past, plan a time when you all meet together to discuss how each of you records of the day’s history vary and how are they similar, and see how individuals have a influence on how they write history. After the meeting you will write a paper discussing three how and why the recordings are different and what you’ve learned about how history being recorded as a whole.

Questions to consider:

What is “history”? What happens when “history” is written? What are the tensions that arise when writing “history”? Should “history” be revised? When? Who writes “history”? What are the limitations of writing “history”? In other words, what are the limitations of textual (or archival) “history”? What are your personal feelings when recording your history?

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Requirements:

Your recording of the day your group’s choosing should be at least 1 1/2 page(s) Your reflective paper should be 2-3 pages in length. You will include a 2-3 page introspective piece that addresses four out of the six questions listed above. You will turn in a page-length writer’s memo.

Your writing packet should include:

Final draft of all requirements Any drafts reviewed by the writing center

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Appendix G: Redesigned Inquiry I, Second Semester Students

Inquiry I: Close Critical Reading (Second Semester)

Project: Over the past weeks, we have discussed different environments; people, rules and societies that our main characters in each book have been subjected too. They have created, in a sense, their own world and attempted to take over their own destiny. Suppose it is your turn to take control and create an environment that is most conducive to you. In this project, you are asked to create your ideal learning environment, at the college level. Construct a classroom setting that addresses everything including; rules, layout, classmates, size, teacher "characteristics" and curriculum. Visual Aides are highly recommended. It should be as long as you see fit to describe your setting, but it must be in a sensible amount of detail. The minimum page requirements should be two pages, and please no more than six. Be realistic! Points to Consider: -What is the teacher(s)' demeanor towards students? -How is the classroom set up (how many student's, round class/square, long tables/desks, posters, decoration, etc.)? -What is the curriculum (What learning material, grades, assignments, etc.)? -What are the classroom's rules (regarding technology, your say in your grades, etc.)? -Discussion-based class or Lecture-based class? -What other aids will be used (PowerPoint’s, You tube videos, Clicker questions, etc.)? -What would the students be like (amount, age, race, intellect level, gender, etc.)? -Have fun with this, think out of the box, and feel free to stray away from the standard set-up Upon completion, you will be reading 3 other classmate's projects who created a classroom in the same subject area as your own (meaning three people will be reading yours, so nothing overtly offensive and try not to be dry!). The goal of this project is to compare your Utopian Classroom to others. What similarities do you see? Is there such thing as a perfect classroom setup? Or, does everyone have his or her own personal preference? Introspective Inquiry:

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This project allows you to create your Utopia classroom setting. What were the cultural, societal, and experiential factors that contributed to your perception of what the perfect classroom should be? Are there past experiences that affected the way you view certain traits when it comes to the various aspects listed above (in "Points to Consider")? What were your critiques on the classroom settings of today; did you have anything in common with your classmates? After reading about 3 other student's classrooms, what would you change (if anything)? Why would you change it or (why not)? Questions that must be addressed (MANDATORY...yes I know this is redundant): - What is one thing that you would change in each of your peers classrooms? - Why was this the one thing that stuck out the most to you as different? - What made you want to change this characteristic (past experience, culture, etc.)? - What is one thing that you would keep in each of your peers classrooms? - What is it about this aspect that you agree with and why? - What are the major differences that you have found in your classroom from everyone else's and why do you think this has occurred? -Do you still think yours is perfect after reading other students ideas? Writer's Memo This will be a one-page reflection of your experience writing the paper. Answer the following questions, and also include anything else you feel compelled to that is related to your experience with the composition of this project. (If you want to defend your Utopian Classroom feel free to do that now). -What were your feelings on the assignment when you first got it? -What are your feelings now? -How did you approach the assignment? -What would your change? Why? -What grade do you think you deserve?

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Appendix H: Sampling of “Letters to Future Students”

Dear Students, This inquiry has been assigned to you to invigorate your thoughts on other races, genders, and sexes other than yours. The goals of this inquiry is to get you out of you comfort zone and maybe feel a little awkward about what you are writing about. Try to change your whole mind set to that of what you think another person’s life is like. This will not be easy. Approach the assignment with an open mind and try not to feed into all the stereotypes of an individual or people. It is an objective that the reflection of this paper will include sharing and discussing what differences you brainstormed or wrote about in your paper. Did you feed into the stereotypes? What sources are you using to define your characterizations? Are you really able to see the difference in life by writing about another individual? This inquiry is better than the original because it rearranges the writing process, and makes it easier. It also leaves a difference up to the writer. It does not only test the writer’s creativity, it also test the writers nerve and ability to think outside the box, or take their writing to another level. There is not much diversity at Miami, so there is a chance that many of the stories may be the same. I hope the students will take the incentive to think beyond the rim and shoot for an uncomfortable moment in literature. These moments seem to be the best and most interesting. I know this seems a little off the wall and unusual. That’s the whole point of this class, so be prepared to bring your rawest ideas to the table. The rawest ideas are usually the best. Be a totally different person and project them the best way you know how. Good Luck!! Be Sal

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Dear Future Student, This class will be nothing like any English you've ever taken. The typical formats that you have used in the past will most likely not be of any use to you. Instead, this class allows you to write in whatever manner you like. Although this concept may be hard to accept at first, you'll be thankful as the year continues that there isn't any set format. The writing in this class will force you to explore different aspects of issues within society or cultures. The assignments require a sense of freedom with your words, in some cases the more opinion the better. Hope you have as much fun as I did and good luck!

Dear you, By now, this is at least, the third one of these letters you have read. Obviously, you have realized that this class is much different than any English class you have taken in the past. Needless to say, you have much more freedom in your writing. Having said that, I would like to tell you to appreciate this opportunity. Jose does tries as hard as he can to make you realize that the world isn’t about a five paragraph paper with exact requirements for your margin size. Also, I would like to ask you to please, please, if you have not done so with any of the other projects, take this last assignment and really use it as an introspective piece. You are probably not an English major and more than likely you have little to no interest in it. Think about this though, if this is for your Miami plan, this may be the last time you have an opportunity to do some creative writing. Really think about this last assignment. Really put some heart into it. Jose won’t make fun of you (to your face… well he might). For your personal development as a human being put some thought into this one and don’t turn in something that you’re not absolutely proud of. Something you know you wrote from the heart. You’ll feel better about your work and more than likely your voice in the piece will be much stronger for it. On to my assignment, last year, Inquiry III or tres for those of you who like a little spice, we had to write a conversation between two people from different parts of society. We wanted to change that a little and make it more about you realizing something as the author. We decided to make this a conversation or a scene where everyone is different from you. It is up to you to decide what different is; and I’m sure you know by now Jose isn’t going to tell you either. Just as I said take this last opportunity to look inside yourself and really put together a quality piece of

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work. Who knows maybe you’ll find out something about yourself while you are looking around upstairs (that would be your brain if you missed the reference).

Dear future student, I hope you find this assignment as beneficial as I did. For the paper you will be writing, you are given a prompt with necessary requirements such as the monograph, introspective piece, and writer’s memo. It is amazing what you will learn and gain from writing each one of these pieces. You really do gain perspective on the assignment at-hand and life as well. You will be commemorating a day for a specific person/event. I know as I did this I learned the problems and issues that can arise from writing history and how different people portray different stories. However, this is not the only purpose of the assignment. We are making the monograph in news report entry so as to put you into the story of whatever event/person you may choose. You will obtain a lot from this because you will see first-hand how much history can be biased. In addition, how reliable that information is, depends on the source and not all sources can be trusted. That is also why we suggested you stay away from Wikipedia for that exact reason. When you enter into this paper I urge you to take the questions on the assignment sheet into consideration. Although you are not answering these questions in the monograph, such things as “What factors go into a reliable news story” are things you may want to keep in mind to develop your paper. The other aspects of the assignment that will be a little different are the introspective and writer’s memo pieces. The introspective piece will now incorporate the book The Tattooed Soldier. There is a lot of action in this book and an immense amount of news could certainly be reported throughout it. Your job is to connect the questions your answering to the contents of the novel. Not all of it has to be associated but minor ties here and there will benefit you greatly. As for the writer’s memo, the only change you will have now is that you must include what you thought was the purpose of the entire assignment. Rather than the professor tell you what you are learning, you will explain what you gained and the main significance of the whole assignment. I’m sure you will have your own unique perspective on the assignment, but I suggest you put in the time to do this because you will not regret it. I look at writing a different way now by how I approach various prompts. I definitely have learned to take more parties into consideration

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when addressing the issues I am writing on. Things like that will help you become a better writer and a better person as well.

May 7, 2010 To Whom it may Concern: Hello future students of English 112, and welcome to Jose De La Garza's English class. In this assignment you are asked to critique the society you live in and create a perfect one. Is this possible? Can society truly be perfect? That's based on your own opinions and life lessons. These questions and more will be discussed throughout the course. I encourage you to truly pay attention and open your eyes, because if you haven't realized it yet, the world is a large place and lots of things are going on that we don't even realize. Hopefully this assignment opens your eyes a little more and you discover how this world truly changes, and that changes are needed to help create a more perfect society. But realize, we truly can't reach perfection without upsetting someone else. So who do we choose to upset? Who decides this? Can we ever be truly fair to everyone? I hope this letter has made you think and truly question the society we live. Believe me, more issues will be discussed through this course, so keep and open mind and have fun. The class is truly what you make of it. It can be either the most boring class on your schedule, or a real eye opener and an inspiration to go out and change this society. Good luck and enjoy!

Your Friend,

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Appendix I: Notional Interview Questions 5. What were the themes of your English 112 course? 6. What were the assignments you were asked to complete for the course? 7. What were the elements of your last assignment? What were you asked to complete? 8. What did you think of the assignment? Was it difficult or easy? Did you enjoy it? 9. What would you say was one of the least or most enjoyable aspects of the project? 10. What made you decide to use [X] in your sequence [X] assignment? 11. In your materials your stated/displayed [X]. What significance did that play in relation to the rest of your project? 12. In your presentation, you stated [X]. What did you mean by that? 13. Did your experiences with the assignments of your English 112 class influence your own ideas of education and activism? How or why not? 14. Based on your current experience, do you have suggestions for ways this assignment might be better taught in the future? 15. Did you ever feel as if your own ideas of assignments and activism were in conflict with the purposes of the course? If so, how did you handle this? 16. What was creating an assignment you know is being used now, like? 17. What do you think students want in/out of assignments that teachers frequently do/don’t address? 18. Who was in charge of José’s class? And how? 19. Did the class change the way, influence the way, you see/saw education and writing? If so, how? 20. Is there anything else you’d like to talk about in relation to English 112 and/or your work in the course?

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