F. Niyi Akinnaso's “Literacy and Individual Consciousness” (1991)

Here's another bit from Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook for my grad school prep.  I don't know if I've really found a solid application for the classroom, but I think there's value to my reflection on the way Akinnaso uses an autobiographical tone to talk about intellectual development.  

Learning is always an individual moment, even within a socio-historical context . . .

            I can see why this is a popular text, anthologized up and down.  After reading it, I found a pretty deep stream of posts by students explaining how much they identified with the personal narrative that Akinnaso tells.  I’ll admit that I’m in that camp.  The rise of the academic in the world of the ostensibly anti-intellectual is a narrative that I’ve pinned on myself, not vainly but self-immolatingly to be more than a little dramatic about it. 

            The questions that Akinnaso addresses are important ones, though nebulous and not really satisfactorily answered: how and why do some individuals choose to use literacy to shift their intellectual and social standing?  Is this literacy creating new consciousness or facilitating the growth of an already-burgeoning awareness? 

            The lack of a complete answer to the first question leads to some discrepancies in the second though.  For much of the essay, Akinnaso seems to believe that the answer to the latter question is that literacy creates new consciousnesses in the individual, though it seems like his story almost contradicts him – instead suggesting that the initial choice of literate practices as a hobby acted as a spark that literacy grew and shaped into a new way to view both language and the world.  His interest in literacy existed prior to the start of his pen pal relationships, for example, and even though he notes that he participated in these activities and then his “ability to read and write had transformed [him] beyond [his] immediate environment,” it seems instead that an initial motivation existed and the practice refined and reshaped his understanding of what it meant to be and act as a literate person.  In this way, Akinnaso’s autobiographical sketch seems almost akin to Mao’s description of the dialectic of theory and practice in “On Practice.”  The material conditions of colonized life put him into contact with the literacy practices of the colonials; his shift toward the intellectual sphere accompanied his rejection of his father’s place in the mode of production; this led to his changed perception of the world, which led to his rupture with local culture, etc etc.

But that’s only tangentially about reading . . . bring it back a little . . .   

            There were specific assumptions about reading that Akinnaso clung to though, ones that rile me both intellectually and autobiographically.  He describes four levels of reading, each building on the previous one, but always in terms of response.  With each reading, the metaphorical implications of the text become more clear, but not the initial reading of the text.  For Akinnaso, the first reading is at the literal level and therefore is missing important elements of the text (no argument there) but there is never a point in which this literal reading is added to.  It’s as if the initial reading is clear but must be seen on further symbolic, socio-cultural, or archetypal hues on later readings.  For Akinnaso then, reading is very much like looking at an allegorical religious painting – the literal depiction of a shepherd fending off wolves from his flock is inherently clear (which in reality is often not the case if the image of the shepherd isn’t already familiar) while the association of this image with Jesus’ protection of his followers from Satan isn’t acquired until later when the viewer learns the tricks of applying other codes to the text.  The literal content is clear from the first reading and further investigation is only about uncovering other deeper and more sophisticated readings.

            This is where I split from Akinnaso (and where I would venture to guess that his narrative splits a bit from reality).  Every memory I have of acquiring literacy involved incomplete readings of the most literal level of the text – what I later described to students as swinging on a vine blindly through a jungle, groping wildly for something else to grab.  Eventually, I would find something solid.  In Goethe’s Faust it might’ve only been a few lines here and there while Milton’s Satan usually provided me with rebellious and angsty sentiments in amidst obscure Old Testament tirades.  However, I continued through the texts, reading incompletely but progressively. 

In the classroom . . . sort of concrete . . . still a little abstract . . .

            Akinnaso raises the important issue of choice though, one which we dismiss as nebulous or wild at the cost of both ourselves and our students.  For me, choice was always easy to inspire when I was a 7^th and 8^th grade teacher – they’re such little kids at that point that it’s easy to get kids excited about anything – and less so in 9^th grade and beyond.  Universally though, I’ve seen that engaging kids with texts that seem too difficult works if you set it up as an almost-insurmountable challenge, then show them ways to make meaning from those texts.  I remember having that experience with Poe and Shakespeare in my early years teaching, using the annotation method I was developing to help struggling readers make meaning out of texts that seemed totally inaccessible, then having that experience again teaching Hegel and Marx to upper-classmen.  It’s much easier for students to choose to engage in intellectual work if they choice seems like a viable option.

            Of course,  the colonized choice that Akinnaso made is arguably different than the choice that students make to engage in literacy practices – his was a preference of an invading culture over his native culture, a shift in values, even a rejection of his father’s system of logic – but as anyone who has taught students from working and lower-class communities might have noticed, the difference isn’t as great as we might think.  Although there were powerful intellectual forces in my upbringing and I’ve encountered the same in the lives of several of my students, most economically disadvantaged students are also educationally disadvantaged because to engage in certain literacy practices often means choosing an alternative culture – the culture of the bureaucrat or the manager or the teacher (an insidious authority figure in many lives) – over their own. 

The challenge, of course, is to allow students to choose literacy practices that will enable them to act as agents of both their communities and themselves without surrendering anything authentic in the process. I don’t know if Jacotot’s Ignorant Schoolmaster non-method is the answer.  I don’t know if the counterpublic writing of things like Anne Gere’s “Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms” or Frank Farmer’s After the Public Turn are where it’s at.  More questions than answers in this second half here. 

If, as Mao and so many others are pointing out, the interaction with the world reshapes ideas which reshapes the way we interact, etc etc, is the notion of dialectics antithetical to the notion of maintaining a sense of self while learning?

Ong's "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought" (1986)

So I'm off to grad school again - a really exciting program at the University of Michigan - and I'm trying to background read a bit on the academic side of the discipline.  I picked up a copy of Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook, edited by Ellen Cushman and a few others (2001).  I'm really just trying to keep track of my thoughts here, while consistently looking for a way to link the theory with actual daily practice.  

Ong's meat and potatoes . . . 

           Ong’s guiding principal is that there is an objective difference in the language practices of cultures that have writing and those that do not.  These differences cause cognitive changes to occur, suggesting that cultures with writing and cultures without writing have an epistemological incompatibility.  Writing is used in its noun form here because, for Ong, it is always a thing, never an action.  Therefore, it is the existence of writing that changes the shape of a social mind, not the action of inscribing that leads individual minds to conclusions.  Neither does he suggest that the cumulative action of many members of a culture might shape the way that ideas are formed, understood, or critiqued.  Instead, it is a society’s (and particularly a society’s language’s) interaction with the existence of concrete texts that shapes the way the mind works.  To be general, because Ong is very general, this tendency can be seen in the tendency for oral cultures to do things like speak in parables, truisms, rhythmic structures, and in ways that preserve and conserve knowledges.  Literate cultures, on the other hand, can develop things like formal logic because of the ability to move forward and backward in time over the course of a text.  He also argues that it is the existence of writing that makes it necessary or even possible to use words to describe other words (suggesting that Derrida’s whole bit about deferment is pinned on the existence of writing and not on something innate to language). 

            So essentially, this is a socio-psychological argument akin to Fredric Jameson’s work in The Political Unconscious and afterward: the dialectic between social formations and forms of expression are clearly outlined although without explicitly recognizing the relationship to means of production.  Without going too far into it, the development of abstract logics along with the development of writing seems also to mirror the abstraction of social relations as civilizations grow.  To speak in known truisms that were remembered as the roots of a stable community was no longer really an option, since the spatial abstraction that writing enables was necessitated by the greater spatial division between individuals as trade and divisions of labor flourished. 

            It is with this in mind that Ong’s slightly mechanistic title falls short, at least insofar as Writing does not act as a unified subject on thought, the passive object.  The idea that, for instance, “writing separates interpretation from data” misses the point that the rise of writing in the particular cognitive form it took might have come along with the administrative need to distinguish explication and elaboration from utterances -or in the terms used in today’s hegemonic corporate-style models of running things, analysis from the hard numbers (25).

A little Ong in the room . . .

            In the actual practice of teaching students to write, Ong’s essay is useful though.  In the past year, I have been adapting ideas from Judith Hochman’s expository writing pedagogy.  One of the important things I’ve taken from her work (which, I manipulate very freely – I don’t even know if anything I do still resembles her actual recommendations) is the way that writing helps students to structure thoughts.  We have experimented with conjunctions and subordinators in an effort to summarize in a way that actually thinks through the implications of the text, rather than just retelling a story.  Hochman suggests a “because-but-so” sentence formula as one way to help students structure their thoughts in writing.  These three words necessitate the inclusion of a cause, a complication, and an outcome or conclusion.  Therefore, the shaping of a student’s understanding of the text and a response to it comes in a dialectic of reading and writing in these particular forms. 

            Clearly, Ong’s text is talking about a more socio-cultural level (almost sub-species level, if I get a little cynical) when he talks about the way that “Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word” (23).  His is a societal transformation, one that occurs at the level of grammar and syntax.  While I don’t disagree beyond the dialectical complications I’ve already mentioned, I find it hard to work this into day to day practice, even on a conceptual level for myself.  It is only at the individual level (albeit in a microsociety of a class full of individuals) that I can think through Ong’s notion of writing structuring thought, and Hochman’s method is the closest I can get to imagining that working in actual lesson.

Reading Of Grammatology: Annotating REALLY Difficult Texts

So I find myself reading Of Grammatology cover-to-cover.  I've never done it - honestly, I sort of pooh-poohed Derrida for a long time and a bit of that skepticism remains.  It gives me a great opportunity to think a lot about annotating for comprehension on a really high reading level though.  I've always maintained to students that my annotation method mirrored what all competent readers actually do when confronted by a difficult text, but I didn't really have great examples.

But on the train the other day, I caught myself twisted around a particular passage, working out exactly what Derrida was saying.  The process I was going through was exactly what I ask students to do, which is annotate for what the text actually says, not what I connect it to or what I think of it.  The first thing that has to be done is figure out what the text says, and even at the highest levels of reading this is a process that has to happen first, even if only in a split-second before it can be influenced by whatever nuances my personalized reading adds.  It is, perhaps, in slowing down and just looking to translate Derrida's complex prose that I've come the closest to illustrating this step in the decoding process.

“The paradox to which attention must be paid is this:  natural and universal writing, intelligible and nontemporal writing, is thus named by metaphor.  A writing that is sensible, finite, and so on, is designated as writing in the literal sense; it is thus thought on the side of culture, technique, and artifice; a human procedure, the ruse of a being accidentally incarnated or of a finite creature.  Of course, this metaphor remains enigmatic and refers to a “literal” meaning of writing as the first metaphor.  This “literal” meaning is yet unthought by the adherent of this discourse.  It is not, therefore, a matter of inverting the literal meaning and the figurative meaning but of determining the “literal” meaning of writing as metaphoricity itself “ (15).

Contradiction/paradox – exposition of a universal truth comes in the form of metaphor – of representation.  Fixation on the sensible moment is (ostensibly) literal and non-representative.  It is what it is and, in its temporality, is human/accidental/imperfect/momentary, so debased.  However, understanding types of writing in this representational form is (contradictorily) making “literal” writing into a metaphor while descrying its poverty of representational texture.

Of course, there's a clear sense of irony here.  Looking to see what Derrida "actually says" is loaded to the top with implications - speech vs writing, a unified meaning in the text, etc.  However, those considerations come second to the moment of perception for me.  Filtered through my own biases as it may be, I think these annotations of Derrida illustrate the way that the process can be used to decode or translate or productively paraphrase the reading.  At very least, it helped me to understand what Derrida was writing, maybe through an accidental visual example of deferral.  

A Note on Decoding

It's been the cold hard middle of the second semester - beware the Ides of March and all that.  But a good thought yesterday in class . . .

Most of my students decode fairly well.  They're non-readers: for the most part, students who cannot make meaning out of words strung together even if they know a large number of the words.  It reminds me of my early days of high school Spanish.  I had a bit of vocabulary but it took too much processing power to put it all together.

Yesterday, I listened to a student read and heard slow decoding though.  He could do it, but at a low level.  How is this student supposed to make meaning while working so hard to process individual words?  The answer is simple.  He has to take some strain off the processor to free up room for individual programs to run.  He can annotate just a phrase of a sentence, then move on.  He doesn't have to hold nearly as much meaning in his head while decoding the next set of words.

In math, this is a no-brainer, right?  We make students write down the steps of the problem so we can check their progress, but also so that they don't have to hold multiple computations in their heads at the same time.

Annotation isn't for writing in a case like this.  Annotation is a process related to reading - the actual comprehension of a text.

Teaching Reading, Teaching Writing, and the Hochman Expository Writing Method

My program's getting changed again.  It's the way things go.

Anyway, I've been learning about Judith Hochman and her Teaching Basic Writing Skills, along with the method that goes with it.  It's expository writing broken down to the sentence level in a way that makes a tremendous amount of sense.  So often - particularly given the NYC focus on Common Core Writing Standard #1 - we've got students writing arguments of one kind or another, going through revision processes, talking big talk, but without an understanding of what a sentence is.

That seems unbelievable, but stodgy old grammarians have been griping about it for years with a bit of sympathy from me.  Teaching students to correct - much less avoid - fragments and run-on sentences is a nightmare if they don't have words like dependent clause or even noun and verb in their active lexicons.

I'm not a disciple or anything - just doing some PD when I can - but it seems like Hochman's method for teaching writing lines up with my method of teaching students to break down and annotate texts for comprehension while reading.  The link between sentence-by-sentence comprehension of a text has always seemed glaringly related to the process of expository writing, which is how I got cover fire in the early days of the Common Core pre-rollout, using the writing standard #2 and the reading for information standard #2, which basically ask students to explain what a text means and how it conveys that meaning - lots of things about author's craft and rhetorical work.  It was good stuff before the hammer came down and everything was around the focus on a position (which used to be a claim, which used to be a thesis) . . .

So hopefully this is relevant and I can do something with it.  If any of you bare few out there reading this have any input or thoughts, it's been too long since I've heard from some of you.

A Version of an Ignorant Schoolmaster?

This is a half-formed thought, really. The child of necessity. But it might be exciting. 

I got a new student yesterday, 3 days out of DR, with almost no English. It happens. But the question is how I work him in at all, given language obstacles and the fact that we're halfway through a unit. Oh, and I found out about him when he sat down in my class.  So I started with a bit of a cop-out.  I told him that I wanted to see his general reading abilities.  I handed him the text my other students had been working with, a Spanish-English dictionary, and some looseleaf.

I'm terrible.

So I checked in with him quickly a few times while managing my biggest and most needs-intensive class and, honestly, forgot about him for bits of time.  By the end of class, he gave me just shy of three sheets of looseleaf with these translations of the first few pages of Aristotle's Metaphysics.  I was floored.  I guess I often forget that students come literate in reading but illiterate in speech, strange because I would say nearly the same thing about my own Spanish.  But it seems to me that I can work with this.

Of course, Rancière and Jacotot came to mind.  I was certainly an ignorant schoolmaster at this point, though perhaps a lot closer to the blustery fool type than I'd like to admit.  But still, the method might hold something here.  Todos los hombres por naturaleza desean aprender.  (I would've put in ser instead of aprender . . . I'm not sure if this is intonation or intention or if I'm just wrong).

Is this a student who I can work with along the lines of Jacotot's Calypso could not . . . a word by word translation to learn a language?  I feel like the pressures of a huge classroom are going to drown this.  How many students did Jacotot have?  Rancière never really mentions that, does he?  

I always assumed that I would use The Ignorant Schoolmaster in conjunction with my reading and annotation method in an English to English translation, but this seems even more in the spirit of Jacotot's project (at least as Rancière frames it).  

This is What I'm Talking About! Using the Annotation Reading Method to Read Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter

So I just got a frantic email from an old student.  She waited till a bit late to start reading Hawthorne because she knew that she had the long Thanksgiving weekend to catch up.  This is pretty unlike her.  I'd also point out that she doesn't generally get challenged by the concrete level of the text.  So, when she encountered Hawthorne's dense prose, she freaked out.  Here's a version of my reply.  This is exactly how students can use the annotation reading method to begin to read Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, just as they can use it to read any number of difficult texts.  My sample annotations of Hawthorne are included below.  

Hi ________,

Oh yeah!  I love that Mrs. ______ teaches that novel because it challenges the brightest of the bright.  Hawthorne's prose is so hard to get used to (but once you're halfway through or so, it will just seem natural).  

Think about how I taught you to read Poe way back in the day and the lessons from 9th grade about reading and annotating, if you remember.  Reading a few lines ofThe Odyssey and then writing what was happening, reading a little, writing, etc.  The basic idea is to read a very little bit and pay attention to what you DO understand, and then write that down (that's the annotation - the writing what you do know).  With Hawthorne, it's one thing to get the sense of what's going on and another to know every single word and phrase that he's using.  That's graduate school (or at least advanced undergraduate) level.  I know that's hard for you - to not understand everything as you go because you're quite bright - but it's how reading really works.  I read on something like a 734th grade level and sometimes I have to gloss over things.

But how do you do this?  I've attached 2 documents.  One is a sample of how I think you can proceed.  The crossed out words and phrases are things that I think you might not know right off.  Learn all these words and figure out the meanings of the odd phrases, but do it on the second, third, and fourth time you read the text.  For now, you're really looking to understand what's happening.  Again, I know that you want to understand everything, but in trying to do that right away, it's shutting you down and you're not getting much of anything.  So try this.

The 2nd document I've attached is the whole text in a split version, just like the sample I sent to you.  If it helps, read it this way.  To cross things out on a computer, highlight them and press "Ctrl" and "shift" and "X" all at once.  Or something like that - I've got a Mac. so it's a little different.  Or sneak into the school library and print the whole thing off.  It's less than 300 pages . . . don't tell anyone I suggested that.  :)

A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes. The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the Vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front.

There’s sad, dreary men with beards and hats. They’re mixed together with women. They’re in front of a wooden place with a heavy wooden door . . . (edifice probably means building of some kind, because it has a door . . . in Spanish, what does edificio mean?) These people founded a new colony They originally were all about happiness in the beginning Recognized a necessity some of the soil to be a cemetery and some to be a prison It’s safe to assume that the first people of Boston built the first prison near Cornhill Does this mean in the same season that they marked out the first cemetery? Nucleus . . . center, right?  Like in a cell? The center of the place was an old churchyard – King’s Chapel It’s certain that 15 years later The jail was stained and old This gave it a dark and sad look