Rhetoric, Technology, Culture Spring 2011

Hey Amber!
Great Podcast and I hope you shake your cold pretty soon! I really enjoyed how you used the readings as an opportunity not only to grapple with the work you do in education, but also to open up the conversation with your listener by directly asking questions. Well, I’ll bite. In one of Blythe’s most productive arguments for thinking about agency, she says that, “We gain [agency] not by being an autonomous individual, but by being part of something larger, by being a part of systems that constrain and enable simultaneously” (173). You already cited this passage in your podcast, but it’s worth reiterating here because we are so used to hearing statements about agency that speak from a position of misguided idealism. I find Blythe’s idea oscillation between limitations and opportunities very compelling, then, when we consider the nature of the systems to which we belong. Furthermore, we are particularly well accustomed in our discipline to hearing statements about composition as agency or the democratizing effect it can have in the world. While I do not disagree with this kind of idealism, Blythe’s emphasis on the mundane reorients our perspective in some interesting ways. You mentioned how frustrating it was to work in education, where there is an admittedly limited amount of resources. No matter how many grant proposals you write or pleas for help you send out, you seem to run into the same limitations embedded in your organization. How might Blythe help us to think through a shift from a top down approach with writing to the mundane? In other words, she argues that (re)examining and (re)writing the mundane texts in an organization often make these new texts a nexus of unexpected institutional change.
In response to your question about the distance enhancement project, I would agree that it has been challenging both ideologically and in practice. I think the overlap between the two is part of that very problem of distance (from an institution), which you touch on in your podcast. In Longos’ discussion of the relation between culture and activities, he argues that “If, as technical communicators, we make decisions based only on our understanding of activities and not of the cultural contexts in which these activities are embedded, we run the risk of proposing documents and systems that do not fit well with the organization where we work and our goals for the future […] We also need to understand how people in the organization will react, with all their histories, personal relationships, strengths, and limitations” (160). Longo suggests that in order for technical communication to be effective, a knowledge of the culture as well as the activity is essential. Likewise, Blythe argues, as previously mentioned, that agency is only cultivated when one is a part of an institution. Neither of us are members of one another’s larger institutional communities even though we have built a small bridge with this class. Problems of telescopic philanthropy are exacerbated when confronted with the difficulty of writing the kinds of mundane texts that Blythe argues for.

Nice job on this week's podcast, Amber. Sorry about the cold and the other "technical difficulties" with the thumb drive.

It seems to me that your podcast raised as many questions as it addressed. I, for one, do believe that our role as teachers is to not only to teach students the sense of agency, but also to help them practice it and to strengthen it wherever possible.

While classroom practice has changed a great deal in the last few decades, if our readings concerning the influence on learners that multimedia and digital literacy, as well as gaming, have shown anything, it's that the classroom can no longer be a staging area for content delivery that envisions the teacher as the expert and the students as the vessels into which the expert pours knowledge. The constraints of the new digital economy, and the world of online commerce and information exchange demands that we, as teachers, do exactly what you and Blythe suggest. We need to teach students how to negotiate between what public knowledge or social forces present as truth and their own understanding of a "text's" meaning. Students today must learn to evaluate and parse meaning in an avalanche of conflicting ideas and contexts. We need to seek ways to provide them with a scaffolding to their thinking processes. We need them to be able to read critically, think independently, and write analytically no matter what content we teach. By supporting a student's efforts to do all these things we help them to not only gain agency but strengthen their sense of connection to the material and the digital environment they most often live in.
Concerning the distance enhancement issues you raise, I think the they point to the nature of a life lived online. While you are right the fact that we could not climb in the car and come for a visit made the enactment of the projects difficult, I think that that problem forced us to seek alternative avenues to foster concrete change and into an online problem solving environment. By closing off the physically easiest pathway to understanding each others' institutions we had to turn to other ways to "interact" with each other. It brought home several important concepts to me, not least of which were the meaning of "community" and agency. After making an effort to understand how life is lived on your campus, I began to think about ours in a new way.