Two Feet In | Writing and the Institution

A month ago I practiced using video for guest engagement discussions between other scholars and my student-colleagues. With the practice under my belt, I asked Professor Vershawn Ashanti Young, author of Your Average Nigga (2007), currently at University of Waterloo, Ontario. I had reached out to him over the summer and asked him to work with my class, coming next week. In exchange, he asked if I would explain my ethnographic studies to his own class, titled "Love, Language, and Leadership." Specifically, he asked me to address themes from Pelias's book of personal relationships, especially his autoethnography of his family. Thinking that his students would appreciate learning from my student-colleagues more than me, hearing voices from racial and class backgrounds unfamiliar to most Waterloo students, I arranged for a Latina student working on a family project and an African-American student working on a black barbershop project to speak briefly about their work and...

Creative Commons Peckham, Irvin. "Arguing." Going North, Thinking West: The Intersections of Social Class, Critical Thinking, and Politicized Writing Instruction . Logan UT: USUP, 2010: 67-85. Print. FYW's distinction is to see one's writing from the other's eyes. This goes back to Flower and Hayes and earlier -- the need for the author to write beyond himself, expecting a reader to experience and interpret.  As cognitive psychology progressed in the late 1970s, more specific applications of the social science were proposed for the composition course. In 1977, Carnegie-Mellon English professor Linda Flower directly proposed the use of problem-solving strategies in composition (Flower and Hayes, “Problem-Solving Strategies” 450-452). [Flower and her psychologist colleague John Hayes believed that heuristics open complex communication processes to the possibility of rational choice. These problem-solving strategies could help the struggling writer put idea...

Notes [showing more about my own note-taking habits than any obvious learning going on; see Zebroski, reading protocols] Awkward prefatory remarks -- condescending, even. Reflection: When I asked students the next day to discuss Orosco's presentation, everyone felt that the prefatory comments were a waste of time and "made no sense at all." Community Service Organization (CSO) > Chicago Industrial Organization (Alinsky, Rules for Radicals ) Reflection: My first reading of RfR was actually at North Harris College, class unknown. Things have changed. I still have that paperback copy and was looking for additional copies recently and found conservative responses to Alinksy, some of whom believe he's Mephistopheles himself. I tried to read portions of these responses and they're horribly written -- zeal, without knowledge. Nor empathy. Nor concern about community. Alinsky didn't start the culture wars, but those who fight them see him as a kaiser of...

I had been asked to give a presentation to the Cultural Awareness group on campus, co-sponsored by the Phi Theta Kappa chapter, an update on my study of the rhetorical ecology of Aldine and the effect of that ecology on (often) FTIC students at a community college. Attendance was strong, food was served (doesn't hurt attendance), faculty from various disciplines, some deans and administrators. Tech worked fine. My data are up to date. The discussion of public sphere is up to date with current theory, etc. Stumbled over the Heisenberg principle, but not important. Well received, applause, questions, one of which was in fact irrelevant to my presentation and I believe this was because literacy theory isn't discussed here much and I didn't think to define it strongly enough. Ironically, a student afterwards and off to the side asked a question about street art that showed she understood current literacy theory than the faculty who had asked the question, and we had an engagi...

“Rhetoric” may have been argued from Plato’s re-creation of Socrates's dialogue with Gorgias as persuasion, but it should be more clearly articulated in Aristotle’s Rhetoric as the environment or opportunity to persuade. Aristotle understood that in that environment, rhetoric was simply a tool that may be used within a social setting to engage and reveal one author’s point of view, and that no actual persuasion may actually take place -- in other words, even with skills used by the Sophists who were aware of the articulation and gestures appropriate to public oration, no techné was guaranteed to produce a result of real persuasion. Further, as Aristotle explained for all tools, rhetoric could be used for good or evil (only virtue was exempt from this possibility) and therefore may include components of logos, pathos, and ethos but would not necessarily be “reasonable” in the agora . Because of these limitations of the ancient discussions of rhetoric, we must look to somethin...

You are invited to the  East Aldine Management District Quarterly Civic Forum that will be taking place  Thursday, September 25, 2014 from noon  to 1pm  inside the district's office which is located at 5333 Aldine Mail Route Rd. Houston, TX 77039.  If you are going to attend, please let me know at your earliest convenience simply by replying to this email.   We would also like to use this opportunity to invite you to NCI’s focus group, which will take place right after the luncheon. They will be doing this focus group to present the themes and program opportunities that have come out of the interviews that they have conducted around the East Aldine community. They will be doing this to get your feedback and perspective of the themes and program opportunities.   If you can attend please RSVP at this link :  https://aldinefocus. eventbrite.com    and if you know someone in the community that is interested in the new center and ...

[This was the post I was told to remove/unpublish]. Considering that a) it's an actual account of a public meeting where b) the Texas Open Meetings Act would validate all my account except the c) sardonicism, which is my First Amendment right to hold even if it might reflect poorly on my maturity, I re-post it here as an academic and intellectual inquiry. Read at your own risk.] "...culture and education aren't simply hobbies or minor influences. They are hugely important in the affirmation of differences between groups and social classes and in the reproduction of those differences" (Pierre Bourdieu,  "The Intellectual Class Struggle,"  New York Times , Jan. 6, 2001 ). After the current semester began, the faculty and staff began to receive multiple emails about a "College Forum" to be held, with breakfast  and that all are invited. First, as I tend to do, some etymology: college (n.)   "body of scholars and students within a univers...