Reading about Cultural Studies in relation to Composition Studies was especially exciting for me this week. As some of you may know, I am also in a class which is focusing on Stuart Hall and the Cultural Studies phenomenon he created in England. I have been trying to wrap my head around all the readings that I have done in that class, reading and beginning to try to understand the words of Althusser, Williams, Hall and Gramsci, I've been unsure as to how to implement it in any of my other areas of interest.
So naturally, in the Berlin piece last week, the idea of "ideology" piqued my interest in that not only is ideology a terribly confusing mass to navigate sometimes, but I saw the intersection of my two classes really begin.
Reading the George and Trimbur helped established some main connections as to what cultural studies is, but more importantly, how we can connect it to writing. The most pure and basic connection between cultural studies and writing is the "encoder/decoder" relationship, which both as a separate entity engage in. The question that George and Trimbur raise then, is how to mix these encodings and decodings together. It seems that they pointed to Berlin for the answer as he:
designed assignments to help students understand the performative rules that code the production of messages (such as privileged dichotomies, denotation and connotation, underlying narrative, and preferred meanings as well as the variable positions (dominant, negotiated and oppositional) available in decoding at the point of consumption ( qtd in Tate 82).
To understand how these things function in the world, especially in media studies, can really help a writing student understand how their voice can CHANGE the world. If they understand how the social world constructs this meaning, then they can change those meanings in their writing. So naturally, it would seem, that cultural pedagogy can go hand in hand with expressivist pedagogy, especially in terms of voice. This is why the idea of voice was so important for me to understand and probe in last week's discussion.
Mike Rose's article "The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University" delved more into the semantics or structuralist side of Cultural Studies. By applying specific words such as "Developmental" or "remedial" to certain writing students, there is a certain stigma attached with is. I think it shows just how powerful word choice can be, because as we saw many times throughout the article, so many word choices can marginalize all sorts of different people, with regards not only to race, ethnicity, gender, etc, but how their writing skills are judged.
I especially liked how he broke down "English as a Skill" and linked the value of skill "but it is valuable as the ability to multiply or titrate a solution or use an index or draw a map is valuable" to English as a "skill" thereby coming to this conclusion: "So to reduce writing to second class intellectual status is to influence the way faculty, students, and society view the teaching of writing" (qdt in Villanueva 554-555).
I think this whole passage fit well into our discourse of just how difficult it is to teach writing, when we now know how many perceive the teaching of writing to be "so easy" and that "anyone can do it." mentality.
Furthermore, I just want to plug Mike Rose a little more. I was first exposed to him in my Advanced Writing Course at Millersville (see now even looking into that course name is making me wonder....) when we read Lives on the Boundaries: A Moving Account of America's Educationally Unprepared. I credit this book as one of the factors in making me interested in teaching writing.Im not sure how well known Rose is (to me before this particular class, I had never heard of him) but this book is just a great read on so many levels! I would highly recommend it to everyone in our (English 507 class)
(Again, I tried to upload the image, but I just must be doing something wrong...)
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I think the ultimate connection between cultural studies and composition is about power. The relationship between composition and cultural studies can not deny the importance of critical reading by the audience and agenda of the writer.
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