Revisiting a talk by Andrea Lunsford on writing in the 21st century

Andrea Lunsford

Andrea Lunsford gave a keynote address several years ago --entitled The Role of Rhetoric and (New Media) Writing in 21st Century Universities--  at the NC Symposium on Teaching. Her presentation is worth revisiting for its ongoing relevance to teachers of writing at the college/university level.

Her presentation (the audio of which is linked to below) ocused on: 1) re-framing the notion of 'writing' to include involvement with mediums other than text, 2) shifting the focus of such writing towards "making things happen in the world", and 3) maintaining a commonsensical and also arch case for the value of rhetoric-based education.

These are all premises that underpin the DMA course, and bolster my ongoing development as a teacher. It's the second item --making things happen in the world-- that I think resonates with the social, conversational writing that I have advocated for some time. In writing conversationally there is a real audience, real perspectives are transformed, and this in turn affects how we live and learn in the real world.

Lunsford is a Professor of English and Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford. More importantly in my scheme of things, she practices everything she professes. As such, her keynote was insightful and inspiring, and full of good examples. As might be expected, her presentation was also exquisitely balanced in its rhetorical appeal and delivery.

She first became one of my heroes when she clearly stated her support for the idea that student writing --including texting and everything else-- is indeed WRITING, and should for this very reason be accorded the highest respect. Many were the times that I shook my head as teachers, who were my audience in workshops I used to give re: how to use the internet, would say that they could not get students to write because they (the students) were too busy texting, messaging, and emailing one another.

I knew these teachers meant that texting and so forth were not the same as writing essays, but still it gave me pause, I mean real pause, because they did not seem to hear themselves actually saying that students had no time or motivation for writing because they were writing too much. And, gulp, sometimes, all to often really, these types of comments were coming from teachers of writing. So it was a joy to discover that Andrea, a bona fide English teacher at a top-drawer university, was insisting that when people are writing they are writing. Let us now be thankful for small things I guess :)

I've had several students write, unprompted, in blogs and so forth that they, too, are delighted to know that Andrea, an adult and English teacher, actually thinks they are bringing important skills and dispositions to the act of writing. Note, though, Lunsford is absolutely certain students need to be able to leverage and extend their abilities in a variety of ways while they are in college, for example by learning how to develop and communicate a stepwise, complex argument (premises, propositions, support, conclusion, etc.) and to do so within a recognizable arc that includes a beginning, middle, and end.

In my estimation Lunsford is side-by-side with Mimi Ito on these kinds of issues --not only in POV, but also in doing the research to back up the POV. Like Ito, Lunsford has for years been involved in careful longitudinal study of youth involvement with media --in Lunsford's case the focus is on student writing, in class and outside of school, and on the myriad ways in which the notion of writing is expanding right before our very eyes (or, with a nod to Derrida, expanding in the eyes of our pupils). It's time to stop bashing student culture, students' new ways of learning, and their writing. It's time to open our own eyes and expand our ways of seeing. Lunsford states this clearly and unequivocally. It is time to understand and build on what's going on, time to get on with it. YES!

So, it was a wonderful experience of convergence, confirmation, and new learning for me to hear Ms. Lunsford talk about the aims, grammars, forms, and nitty-gritty practices of education, and the need to align such matters with the magnificent give and take of the NOW. This is the kind of alignment I am seeking all the time in the DMA course.

So, here's my conclusion. I think everybody should listen to Andrea Lunsford, plain and simple, just like that. Accordingly, I recorded her talk and it can be heard via the embedded media player below. Enjoy!

Turning a corner, catching my reflection

For quite a while I've aspired to Eliel Saarinen's maxim: "Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context -- a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan." With several larger-than-course projects now organizing my teaching practice, I think I am finally realizing this aspiration. I'm deeply involved in program-design in my area. I'm internationalizing my practice. I'm writing two articles, one on the topic of creative planning and another on the topic of education in Facebook. So I am finally working within a next larger context. I have turned a corner.

I have also for some time thought about a point made by Stuart Brand in the documentary film Ecological Design: Inventing the Future. His point is that if a person gets to a juncture in their professional life where they look around and notice that no one is doing exactly what they are doing, then they are doing pretty well! With regard to my own pursuit of an integrated approach to liberal arts, fine arts, and everyday life, I think I am reaching such a point of convergence. I am beginning to see my own reflection in Brand's mirror of professional progress.

A portable, billboard-style blackboard I made --mobile tech!

Appropriately enough for a media studies professor, a key last step in this convergence was the rediscovery of a particular medium --chalkboard drawing of all things. I have my eldest son Will to thank for this. He was at the library and spotted a book called The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures and checked it out and brought it home for me. This book makes a wonderful and solid case for the idea that in order to solve problems one needs to be able to splay things out on a single layer (use chalkboard, whiteboards, lay materials out on a floor or table, etc.) in order to 'get the big picture,' and then distill this into a fairly simple picture.

The aha moment for me in this was the realization I had been frustrated with computers on many, many occasions due to their being what I have now begun to refer to as a 'layer' rather than 'splayer' medium. Rather than seeing one's thoughts on a single surface --as in chalkboard drawing-- computers constantly drive us to work in layers. Books do the same thing for that matter. Both are layer technologies. We literally never see the big picture, and this actually impedes certain modes of thought --in particular, brainstorming and similar modes. For other things computers are of course preferable and wonderful. I'm just more aware now of the need to combine and recombine layer and splayer mediums. My most-prized item in the media studio I teach in is now my portable blackboard, which I made by pulling an unused blackboard out of a closet and making a billboard-style rolling support framework for it by repurposing a wooden desk I had previously made and was not using, and adding clamp lights. I'm tellin' ya, it's a love.

Okay, so the last point in my convergence story is that whilst working at my new chalkboard I noticed that chalk on board (a liberal arts tradition) closely resembled charcoal on paper (a fine arts tradition). So now I am reactivating the fine arts side of my professional practice via charcoal drawings, and also exploring various hybrid forms involving combinations of chalkboard-drawing+charcoal-drawing+new-media. William Kentridge is among those who pioneered such things, so one of my first experiments was to do a Kentridge-style time-lapse movie of a drawing in-the-making. See video to the left.

This all adds up to being a fun and interesting time for me. I'm also (finally) creating a personal website, so I am doing what is for me the arduous work of mining through various and sundry stashes of various and sundry artifacts --fine arts related, liberal arts related, teaching related, etc.-- and putting them in some semblance of order. More on this in a different post.