Entertain Us: A Learning Philosophy Segmented Essay
2005
***
At what moment
did you learn
what it means
to be a student?
Were you a
good student?
Why or Why not?
***
A teacher's strength
is tested with
pedagogical roadblocks.
Where students stick up
signs forbidding entry,
or advising caution,
the teacher must
ask the question "why?"
***
A few weeks ago, I was finishing up a writing class I teach in a computer lab on a day when the students were particularly distracted by the computer screens in front of them. Exhausted by the competition between the day's lesson and the entertaining bait positioned conveniently between them and me, a lyric popped unexpectedly into my head: "Here we are now, entertain us" from the Nirvana song "Smells Like Teen Spirit." It was unexpected because I have never really been a fan of Nirvana or the grunge subculture. But, in that moment, the irony of the line hit home and caused me to reflect on the band and the alternative music revolution of the early 90s in a new way. The song, upon reflection, seems to offer comment on the public's expectation and demand for entertainment instead of art, and it expresses a certain level of frustration with the attitudes of a generation whose anthem seems to be "oh well, whatever, nevermind" ("Smells Like"). The students in that classroom on that day also seemed to be saying, "here we are now, entertain us." If Kurt Cobain felt constrained by the public's expectations for entertainment, should teachers acknowledge the same constraints in theorizing new writing classroom contexts?
***
If I were to write a utopian novel about Comp 101, it would (probably have a very narrow audience) and would look something like this: students arrive to class early, or at least on time; they sit bright-eyed while we explain a concept, asking intelligent questions at just the right moment to keep the discussion from flagging; they strive to make connections on their own between your class and their major, transferring the writing skills you encourage them to develop flawlessly; they have trouble choosing a topic to write about from among all of the interesting, narrow issues buzzing about in their minds. Maybe some of you work at a university like this, but I doubt it.
At all universities, if the conversations in the field of rhetoric and composition are any indication, there are problems bridging the divide between student and teacher values, problems convincing students that the general education requirement introductory composition often fulfills can be an enriching experience with relevance to their lives. Student disengagement is widespread when it comes to composition, which some may attribute to the seemingly "contentless" nature of the field or the relative lack of prestige assigned teachers of this "service" course.
Educational researchers have connected this disengagement with individual differences in the learning styles of students; however, I argue that beyond their individual styles, most beginning students share one common problem: they do not know what it means to be a student or what higher education has to offer them. How could they when their motives for attending school are often not their own in the first place?
***
SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT
Load up on guns, bring your friends
It's fun to lose and to pretend
She's overboard and self-assured
I know, I know, a dirty word
Hello, hello , hello how low,
Hello, hello, hello,how low,
Hello, hello, hello...
With the lights out, it's less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid, and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us
A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido,
Yeah
I'm worse at what I do best
And for that gift I feel blessed
Our little group has always been
And always will until the end
Hello, hello, hello, how low
Hello, hello, hello, how low
Hello, hello, hello
With the lights out, it's less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now entertain us
A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido,
Yeah
And i forget just why i taste
Oh yeah, i guess it makes me smile
I found it hard , it's hard to find
Oh well, whatever, nevermind
Hello, hello, hello, how low
Hello, hello, hello, how low
Hello, hello, hello
With the lights out, it's less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contageous
Here we are now, entertain us
A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido,
A denial (x9).
("Smells Like," emphasis mine)
***
A little subsequent research into the Nirvana lyrics yielded an interpretation from Nirvana bass guitarist, Krist Novoselic, about Cobain's intended irony in "Smells Like Teen Spirit." In a 1999 Rolling Stones interview, Novoselic said, "The mainstream came and grabbed us. I'm a pretty easygoing guy and have a lot of patience. But Kurt wasn't. Kurt despised the mainstream. That's what 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was about - the mass mentality of conformity" (Fricke). Was Kurt "entertaining" the crowd, or was he making an artistic statement? Has art died only to be replaced by entertainment?
Beyond its critiques of conformity, the song also expressed deep dissatisfaction with social inertia. In Novoselic's book, released in 2004, he calls attention to the disparity between the reaction to the song and the song's purpose, highlighting the intended social commentary:
It turned into an anti-anthem that rallied the disaffected. I've always felt that ["Smells Like Teen Spirit"] was an observation of a culture mired in boredom amidst relative luxury. In other words, many have the means to make their own way but choose not to do so. The lyrics don't convey a literal message guiding people toward a sense of liberation. It's simply a comment on a condition. (Novoselic)
It appears that the heroism surrounding the figure of Kurt Cobain was part of the irony, too. Kurt neither wanted nor sought such a broad fan-base who saw him as a "spokesperson" for their generation. The public saw Kurt's mission as expressing undercurrents of boredom, purposelessness, dissatisfaction, anger, cynicism. Such an alienated crowd can only be roused through entertainment, it seems. Mark Edmundson expresses this problem in his "On the Uses of Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students." Is entertainment a "given"? What kind of society yields this "given"? However, he expresses little hope and sees little of redeemable value in the present situation. Richard Miller tells a much more hopeful story about teaching students who find our ideas mildly "interesting" at best. For my purposes, the works of these authors and the Nirvana song lyrics lead to reflection on how entertainment shapes education and student expectations. While we can't change the fact that "Video Killed the Radio Star," and while retreating to Luddite tendencies will not save us, perhaps we should not turn away from many of our own experiences as presumably good students.
***
If teachers should theorize changing expectations on the part of students, we first must accurately assess what those expectations are. As Richard Miller reflects on his relationship with students, he says, "I am learning how to hear what my students are saying. Learning to do this helps me, in turn, to find a way to speak that they can hear. It also makes it possible for my students to learn how to hear what I, as a representative of the academy, am saying and how to speak, read, and write in ways that I can hear" (48). Miller is suggesting that, while his pedagogical strategies move toward students and really listening to them, he also tries to pull them toward his values as a teacher as well.
What are students saying? What are their reasons for attending college?
Prospects for better "capital-J"-jobs, parents' insistence, high school counselors' advice, peer pressure, foregone conclusions, the enticement of four years of socializing and networking. These are some of the real motives listed by my students when I asked them to complete a "college mission statement" writing activity about their reasons for attending school.
Student-centered values, I call these.
My own goals for students include expanding their perspectives, to embrace the Perryian fourth level of thinking, commitment in relativism (Bean 25). This complex reasoning is also described by Wayne Booth as "listening rhetoric," by Peter Elbow as "The Believing/Doubting Game," by Carl Rogers as "empathy," and by Ben McCorkle as a more positive pedagogical version of Orwell's infamous "doublespeak." Yes, I sound like a sophist: I acknowledge the contingency of truth, the fallibility of one set of values in guiding higher education reform versus another. But in these claims, I also want to avoid the traps of utter relativism, an attack so often lodged against modern antifoundationalists.
Along with Alexander Bain, I also understand that "belief is that upon which man is prepared to act" (qtd. in Shook). Along with the classical pragmatists, I see a possibility for action despite uncertainty, as guided by experiential outcomes. We've seen, or at least I've experienced, the type of thinking that liberal arts training can yield; based on that understanding, I believe forming a plan for action is possible.
This means acting based on faculty-centered values, not "in spite of" but "in light of", student-centered values, doing so out of a knowledge that students' best interests are at stake. If they can be taught a liberal arts thinking model, they may lead better lives and enrich society even if classical definitions of "the good student" as the "gentleman scholar" are outmoded and irrelevant. There is no "going back;" this is not nostalgia. Remediation and secondary orality (Bolter and Ong, respectively) have expressed the impossibility of such a return as digital media and the allure of the visual are too strong. However, we should also not turn away from certain core values that have made higher education increasingly important in America since it's inception. In other words, we should ignore what C.S. Pierce has described thusly, even in the face of fallibilism: "We should not pretend to doubt in our philosophy ... that which we do not doubt in our hearts" (Rhodes 99).
I know this is rocky ground; this premise sits askew on decades of valid critiques explaining the exclusion of marginalized groups from the formation of central social values. However, we have seen what happens when the universities are divorced from overt value systems, and the remediating backlash is an "ethics" revival in the curriculum. Thomas Miller's rhetoric and composition scholarship is instructive on these points about proceeding with caution towards civic engagement in the curriculum, revisiting the classical vir bonus dicendi peritus (Quintillian) with a critical eye. If the university really does hold influence over the shape society will take in the future, it's time we recognize that influence and discuss our options.
***
The wry title Kitchen Cooks, Plate Twirlers, Troubadours : Writing Program Administrators Tell Their Stories , a collection edited by Diana George, speaks to some of the tension facing the field of rhetoric and composition. The title plays on notions of administrators and their needs to "sustain the illusion" of perpetual motion, the song and dance routine, or complete control of their programs (xi-xiii), but I argue these metaphors are appropriate for the composition teacher as well in this mediated society. The enduring lesson is that the show must go on, the class must proceed even when students are looking yield signs at the teacher. It is our responsibility to figure out how to save a burned class activity or to continuously give students the "old song and dance" about how our course relates to their lives. Keeping up the illusion, even if necessary to the ultimate success of the class when participation lags, is energy- and time-draining. It's also unrealistic to try to maintain sole control over the success or failure of the class. We need to learn to enlist students, once we've started them to thinking about the meaning of education, in their own instruction.
***
So, I turned my Nirvana musings into a classroom activity. In preparation for an upcoming essay, I demonstrated how an original analysis of the song lyrics might tie into an academic argument...about whether art was dead, about whether entertainment or education was more important, etc. After teasing out some relatively in-depth and exploratory discussion from students over this example, I was dismayed to see the essay proposals: 32 out of 40 students wanted to write about the existence of a link between media influence and youth violence. Why had they all chosen the same topic? And, why was it such a predictable interpretation of the link between media and culture when I had hoped to lead them to a more sophisticated reading of it. Were they working within their comfort zone? Or, was the nagging question that led to so many essays exploring media's influence on violence expressing something else? Perhaps edutainment was proving more powerful than I had at first imagined.
***
The Panther
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
translated by Steven Mitchell.
***
My summary of the rather extrinsically-oriented goals expressed by my class on the whole in their college mission statements does not acknowledge those stragglers and outliers, the student responses that sought "thinking in new ways" or some other intrinsic motivation. However, I think the general shift in the wrong direction is encapsulated by the responses to a question I asked two sections of the same class not long after the Nirvana experiment. I asked, "If you could enroll in college and receive a diploma at the end of four years without ever attending a course or taking a test, merely by paying your tuition, would you do so?" Well over 85 percent of the class raised their hands, indicating that, yes, they found such an alternative reality attractive. The three or four students who didn't raise their hands offered such reasons as needing training for their future vocations so as not to embarrass themselves on the job. It became clear that no one had successfully impressed on these students the integrated nature of learning and the importance of general curricula, as Cardinal John Henry Newman would have it in his 1852 The Idea of a University, to their future success as well.
***
"In the combination of colours, very different effects are produced by a difference in their selection and juxta-position; red, green, and white, change their shades, according to the contrast to which they are submitted. And, in like manner, the drift and meaning of a branch of knowledge varies with the company in which it is introduced to the student. If his reading is confined simply to one subject, however such division of labour may favour the advancement of a particular pursuit, ... certainly it has a tendency to contract his mind. If it is incorporated with others, it depends on those others as to the kind of influence which it exerts upon him. Thus the Classics, which in England are the means of refining taste, have in France subserved the spread of revolutionary and deistical doctrines.... [The student] profits by an intellectual tradition, which is independent of particular teachers, which guides him in his choice of subjects, and duly interprets for him those which he chooses. He apprehends the great outlines of knowledge, the principles on which it rests, the scale of its parts, it slights and its shades, its great points and its little, as he otherwise cannot apprehend them.... A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom" (Newman 35).
***
All of these reflections lead me to see an important role for "metateaching" in the classroom. By this, I mean the laying bare of teacher/faculty-centered values and the reasons for those values, explaining how class activities target this type of education. College mission statements and values as written by university administrators often reflect the integrated nature of learning and are expected to be manifest in the university's general education requirements. For instance, Bowling Green's expressed core values since 2001 are: respect for one another, cooperation, intellectual and spiritual growth, creative imaginings, and pride in a job well done ("Core Values"). These core values are corollaries of the University Vision Statement, which says:
Bowling Green aspires to be the premier learning community in Ohio and one of the best in the nation. Through the interdependence of teaching, learning, scholarship, and service, we will create an academic environment grounded in intellectual discovery and guided by rational discourse and civility. Bowling Green State University serves the diverse and multicultural communities of Ohio, the United States and the world. ("University Vision")
If these values are to be introduced in general education classes, then, that means writing classrooms have a large role to play in this sort of orientation to learning. The final academic writing course in a progressive introductory writing sequence is the only requirement of all students at Bowling Green State University, in fact. And, at many institutions, introductory writing is commonly thought of as the "ur-"general ed. requirement. This would mean that at least some of the responsibility (and some say "burden") for introducing these values and orienting students toward ways of learning falls on an underprepared and often over-worked labor force in writing programs. Where in rhetoric and composition scholarship can we turn for guidelines on teaching students to be students? How does this fall under the broadened scope of "rhetoric" we've fought for? While writing-across-the-curriculum scholarship might touch upon these issues (see John Bean's Engaging Ideas , 2001, for instance), this does not mean that there are clearly developed pedagogies out there theorizing student engagement. Or are there?
I have argued in my dissertation that rhetoric and composition as a field is uniquely suited to guiding the discussion on the student engagement movement and the scholarship of engagement movements currently sweeping the country's institutions of higher learning. Analyzing the movements through the rhetorical lenses of the field can help us develop a metateaching model; we have a broad base of engaged scholarship to draw from, which I have theorized into domains of engaged rhetoric. Also, we have a long history that the discipline harkens to of public scholars and discussions of civic virtue. Our wranglings with these philosophies, which in turn inform the canon of scholarship our doctoral students study, puts us in prime location to act. As a foundational liberal art, rhetoric is both contentless and everywhere at once. Steven Mailloux has called for "rhetoric" as an organizing theme for English Studies reform, and the pervasiveness of new media is necessitating some rhetorical tools to teach students about critical digital literacies.
Noted anthropologist Dr. Conrad Phillip Kottak has written about the "Postmodern Classroom," and in a reflective essay, more experiential than methodological, he traces the changes in today's students. They expect entertainment, he says, a condition brought on by the increasing "teleconditioning" of society. He describes how, over the years, students have become increasingly lax and how one student even wandered into his lecture class with a paperback novel so that she could find a good place to read. Kottak is quick to point out that students' behavior does not, per se, signal an intentional rudeness on the students' part; rather, he sees this as a sign of changing expectations for the college classroom, as precipitated by new media. Edutainment, in other words, has caught on so thoroughly that we can't get away from it. Kottak uses this knowledge in adapting his teaching style, and I think this is an important lesson. If change is upon us, then we should adapt how we must and otherwise guide it instead of riding it wherever it may lead. While there are certainly other philosophies out there regarding the remediation of teaching, this is mine, and that is all I offer it as.
***
Works Cited
Bean, John C. Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical
Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
2001.
Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: Computers, Hyptertext, and the Remediation of Print.
2nd ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001.
Boyer, Ernest L. and Arthur Levine. A Quest for Common Learning: The Aims of
General Education. A Carnegie Foundation Essay. Washington, D.C.: The
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1981.
"Core Values of BGSU." Bowling Green State University. 25 October 2005.
Edmundson, Mark. "On the Uses of Liberal Educaiton: As Lite Entertainment for Bored
College Students." Reprint. The Aims of Argument: A Rhetoric and Reader. Eds.
Timothy Crusius and Carolyn Channell. 3 rd ed. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield,
2000.
Fricke, David. "Rolling Stone - 10/99: Article with Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic
Interviews." The Internet Nirvana FanClub. 25 October 2005.
< http://www.nirvanaclub.com/get.php?section=articles&file=10.00.99.html>
George, Diana. Kitchen Cooks, Plate Twirlers, Troubadours : Writing Program
Administrators Tell Their Stories . Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999.
Kottak, Conrad Phillip. "Teaching in the Postmodern Classroom." General
Anthropology. American Anthropological Association, 1994 . Reprinted online by
permission of the American Anthropological Association and the author.
Accessed 25 October 2005. <http://www.faulkner.edu/academics/artsandsciences/socialandbehavioral/readings/an/teleconditioning.asp>
Miller, Richard E. Writing at the End of the World. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2005.
Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University. Publ. info missing for my copy.
Nirvana. "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Nevermind. Geffen Records, 1991.
Novoselic, Krist. Of Grunge & Government: Let's Fix This Broken Democracy! New
York: Akashic Books, 2004. Chapter 1 available online. Akashic Books Online. 25 October 2005. <http://www.akashicbooks.com/ofgrungeexcerpt.htm>
Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Reprinted from
1982 original. New York: Routledge, 1988.
Rhodes, Keith. "Rhetoric, Pragmatism, Quality Management: Managing Better Writing."
Market Matters: Appliced Rhetoric Studies and Free Market Competition. Ed.
Locke Carter. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2005.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. "The Panther." Transl. by Stephen Mitchell. 25 October 2005.
Shook, John. "The Metaphysical Club." The Pragmatism Cybrary. 25 October 2005.
"Smells Like Teen Spirit." Link from Lyrics.com: Music for Your Head. 25 October,
2005. <http://www.geocities.com/darkpandora/SmellsLikeTeenSpirit.html>
"University Vision and Values." Bowling Green State University. 25 October 2005.
<http://www.bgsu.edu/colleges/library/strategicplan/vision_and_values.html>