Oh prospectus.
So while I'm waiting for the registrar to get me my list of IDs, I digitized my survey for my participants. In a perfect world, I would distribute each in person, shake the hand of my potential participant, and thank them for their time. Instead, I had to go to SurveyMonkey. Bah. However, I do think with my population's own time crunches (I remember being terribly busy as a first-year student, or at least feeling terribly busy), they may be more likely to respond if it's digital. We shall see.
In the meantime, I'm burying myself in my prospectus in the hopes that it'll suddenly, magically clarify. I've made SO MANY assumptions that I didn't realize were assumptions until I was called out. (What do you mean? It isn't obvious that class is a cultural marker primarily free from theorizing? You want what? PROOF?) I found out that I've been doing the same thing I've accused others of doing: blind assertion, scant evidence, because-that's-the-way-I-want-it support. It's really no different than the collapse of productive discourse we were talking about last week. I'm still not optimistic about its return.
I am also interested in this connection between American ideals and discourse patterns. I think the wholesale adoption of the terms pro/con has structured how we think about issues, and we're working in FYC against these simplified answers to posit opinion as usually existing on a continuum somewhere, rarely to live at one extreme or the other. I blame 24-hour news and Internet info bytes. People so often complain that they get "bored" before they're finished reading, so they don't continue. If it's not packaged in easy-to-understand 30-second soundbites, they don't want it. Thus, they don't fully explore any topic. Maybe that's why this prospectus revision feels so painful: I'm deeply engaging with just a few major ideas (too many, if you ask my committee), instead of sliding along a bunch of ideas very quickly. I didn't think I was a member of this newly digital, newly distracted (ahem, conference anyone?) culture.
You've met those students: they google a few terms and make an argument. They visit two or three sites and suddenly have a full understanding of an issue. That's what we're rallying against in FYC. A few googled terms does NOT a strong argument make. In concert, an undertheorized prospectus full of assertions and unquestioned terms does NOT a successful prospectus make.
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3 comments:
What's FYC? Oh, first year composition?
I hate to admit I'm a member of the newly digital, newly distracted culture, but I am, and I'm having to fight against it, hard.
I'm guilty of using the pro/con format in my freshman seminar, and it's amazing how hard it is for them to come up with more than 2 or 3 ideas to support either side of an issue.
I can't believe how short their attention spans are, either. I like to blame the media for most everything :)
Yes, K-12 students have no attention spans, either. Of course, you might expect that from the little ones, but high school? Give them something they have to work through to find solution methods and they say "just tell me how to do it." They don't read, but they are proficient at the keyboard and with texting. They can quote movie scenes by the dozens (many very disturbing), but don't have time to study. If it can't be accomplished quickly, it's likely not going to get done. I don't think the media is to blame as much as those who allow kids unlimited access to media of all types.
So, this is where the old guard hangs out to wax Quixotic about the good ol' days before things like "them thar' intartubes" and "that thar' new media'r" led to our ruination? (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google)
There are, of course, competing discourses:
The media IS the message...media has become so complex that pedagogies must leverage theses complexities to remain relevant...and our kids ARE smarter thanks to popular culture:
Johnson, S. (2006). Everything Bad is Good for You. How Todays Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. Penguin Publishers.
We are products of a print culture that will soon be obsolete in the way oral culture became a palimpsest in the Middle Ages. If we do not learn to adapt to the new literacy, we will ourselves become the new illiterate:
Prensky, M. (2008). Programming: The New Literacy. Edutopia. Available from: http://www. edutopia. org/programming-the-new-literacy
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