Understanding how things are similar to one another and using a known entity–even if in some ways dissimilar–to make sense of a new entity is the only way we make it from day to day, moment to moment, situation to situation without being paralyzed by the task of learning everything from scratch.  People who are better at seeing those connections, constructing those mental metaphors, and using them flexibly are probably people who we generally consider “intelligent.”

It stands to reason, then, that if a metaphor is clear and has connective value, it aids with flexible thinking and problem-solving.  If it’s not–as an example Johnston offers is not–it serves to confuse and obscure.  He cites another researcher’s work about a teacher building an understanding of circuits and electricity.  She tells the students that parallel circuits are like most road systems; when one path is blocked, there’s another to try.  That’s all well and good.  Then the teacher continues: “A series circuit she likens to the World Series: ‘One game after another.  And if you lose a game, you’re out’” (p. 46).

Well, the problem is that’s not the way the World Series works.  And, if we believe Johnston’s later assertion that “because of the power differential between teacher and student, [they] are prevented from evaluating [the teacher],” that metaphor will remain unchallenged in the classroom (p. 56).  Poor baseball fans probably all missed that one on the assessment. (Believe me when I say that nothing from my classroom experience actually suggests Johnston’s power differential argument is at all at play in contemporary schools, but that’s another blog post).

I thought of this example, which I just read yesterday, when a Champaign administrator was lamenting today how affluent parents at one school are treating the school like a store, “shopping for teachers,” demanding access to classrooms and information that really isn’t within the realm of public interest.  Not one to buy into Johnston’s power dynamic malarkey, I chimed in: “Well, [Administrator], when you guys refer to parents as ‘clients,’ they’ll eventually start behaving like clients.”

Johnston takes up this very issue–the power of naming–in the second chapter of Choice Words.  For better or for worse, people are known to take on the social roles–the actions, behaviors, and attitudes–of the label given them (especially when the label suits personal interest and existing patterns of privilege-based behaviors).  In this instance, the school as business metaphor (just about as dead wrong as series circuit as World Series metaphor Johnston cites) has given rise to labels and behaviors that bear out the misguided thinking behind the school-as-business nonsense.  I’ll not get in to the specifics here, but rather will defer to Marxist citizen blogger Caleb Curtiss.

I was especially pleased to hear someone who purports and  benefits from that metaphor — with a salary that allows for the purchase of a luxury SUV and to suggest that I  ”watch Suzy Orman on Saturday nights” and who wishes that that all those workers below her could just implement that rigorous curriculum with more fidelity — complain about its logical conclusion.

• Listening to my NYC playlist — Sometimes as soon as the flight is booked I start cranking the classic and new-classic tunes from this collection of Gotham-themed tracks.  Other times, listening to the playlist prompts the imagination that leads to a trip.  It’s  a vicious circle.  Bernstein’s “Times Square: 1944″ from On the Town  complements the Beastie Boys’ “Open Letter to NYC” just as much as Gershwin’s piano roll of “Rhapsody in Blue” or Ella Fitzgerald’s “Manhattan” plays well against Ryan Adams’ “New York, New York” or LCD Soundsystem’s “New York I Love You, But You’re Letting Me Down.”

• Playing with New York magazine’s restaurant filter — Looking for a kid-friendly, critically-lauded Greek restaurant below 14th St.?  There’s one, and I can tell you all about it thanks to the time-sucking ridiculously multi-faceted search at New York magazine.  Neighborhood, Cuisine, Price Range, and Features are the major categories that invite exploration, each of which opens into a screen of tasty opportunities.  There’s no app for this, so it’s best done before on a standard machine.  Which is fine by me.

• Mentally rehearsing with a New York City map — I’ve not been using my beloved fold-out map of NYC nearly as much since I got my iPhone, but the allure of the map as overview and invitation still holds strong.  Because last summer’s trip was tourist-destination heavy (the USS Intrepid, Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building), this one will definitely be more leisurely and flexible.  But this doesn’t mean I don’t have multiple sequences of potential travel planned out, ready to be enacted as the opportunities arise.

What I respect even more, though, is her moral reason for advocating for such a broad theorization of children’s written language development. As she ends Chapter 5, after sharing the richly rendered stories of first graders using popular culture and other “unofficial resources” to participate and find meaning in the “official world” of school, she points out that the children’s literacy journeys “make no sense if one imagines written language as neatly bounded from learning other symbolic systems, nor if one assumes that children are dedicated apprentices, hovering exclusively around designated experts” (p. 134-135). Her alternative theorization of literacy asks us to see writing as a “potentially satisfying tool for children’s present lives as children” (p. 135). Through the stories of Wenona, Marcel, Noah, and the other brothers and sisters, she asks us to see children as “opinionated, active agents with a human right to a decent, satisfying present—a childhood” (p. 27).

I think I’m so struck at Dyson’s focus on a “satisfying present” because of the level of contrast her perspective provides against the ideology that dominates my professional world—school (and literacy) as preparation for something else. We talk of “College and Career Readiness Standards” as if the four years spent in high school don’t have value in their own right. Framing school as site of preparation does a disservice both to the kids, whose presents/presence are devalued against what distant adults want out of their futures and to the institution of school itself, as it accidentally reveals that its value isn’t in “being there,” but only in an imagined, homogeneous future that only some of the kids will have access to.

So, her viewpoint and research agenda are aspects of the book to admire, but what I love about the book is her particular focus on the use of popular media texts as “toys for a kind of dress-up play” (p. 29). I remember repeatedly drawing TIE fighters and Death Stars all over papers at school when I was a kid (verifying my European American maleness, Dyson would have you know [see p. 74]). And as I saw Colin using Star Wars and dozens of other pop culture resources to support his development as a reader and writer, Dyson’s research brought together previously disparate threads of interest—in language development research, my own past as a reader and writer, and the present and future of my son.

Like the “voices [of popular media] woven into the fabric [of the Brothers’ and Sisters’] everyday lives through the childhood practices they engaged in both inside and outside the school’s physical spaces” (p. 134), thinking seriously about the way textual resources from pop culture shape identity, affiliations, and literacy development has made my life, to use an old-fashioned term, more coherent.

Coherent. That reminds me of the concluding scene of A Little Night Music. I think I may write about that next.

Via Twitter, I ran across this multimodal essay by Melanie Holcolmb, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  In it, she combines images from the Met collections with her thoughts about maps (including the NYC subway map) as tools for communication and inspiration.  ”Is it about grasping the world with a single glance?” she asks. “Or is it about setting out on a journey?”

This trip to NYC will be my first on which my beloved fold-out map of the city is enhanced by my iPhone. Part of me thinks that will be awesome to have even more of “the world at a single [click],” but then part of me thinks thats kind of cheating as well. I’m sure I’ll report my findings.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering what three UIWP Teacher Consultants do when they follow their map to the Met…here’s your answer:

Charlie, Class of 2008

Dan, Class of 2009

Scott, Class of 2010

Instead, through the magic of HD digital technology, I saw a filmed version of it at the Beverly last night. Aside from issues related to the presentation being via film (ridiculously frequent angle shifts, occasionally muffled sound), I enjoyed the concert quite a bit and was reminded why its score occupies a spot in my Sondheim “top three”—beneath Sweeney Todd but alongside A Little Night Music.

Highlights include:

Getting so much of the book scenes in the concert…and left in the film I’ve seen the show three times, but I listen to the cast album much more frequently. It’s amazing how much you forget about the connecting scenes between (and interspersed within) the songs. Stephen Colbert was especially strong in his drink-mixing scene before “The Little Things You Do Together.”

Seeing Martha Plimpton and Kate Finnernan perform Both of these actresses have been getting lots of raves of late, and I’ve never seen either. Plimpton’s work against Colbert (against is an apt preposition—“Uncle, my ass!”) was strong, and Finneran’s pre-wedding scene (including “Not Getting Married to Day”) was as funny as I’ve seen. At times, she resembled Catherine O’Hara in her maniac-with-heart portrayal of Amy. I consider that a compliment.

Inclusion of the Tick-Tock dance sequence I won’t lie, sitting next to my seven-year-old as I realized that song underscoring the sex scene between Bobby and April was not cut (it usually is) was a little unsettling. But once I was assured of its PG-13-ness, it was cool to hear the see and hear the NYPhil with dancers perform this song.

Christina Hendricks’ April Ditzy and dumb do not begin to describe the odd vapidity of this character. Hendricks’ reaction to Bobby’s apartment, her delivery of the “butterfly story,” and response to the “champagne and baby oil” story mined every bit of comedy out a character that I imagine is very difficult to play.

Disappointments:

Stephen Colbert’s rendering of “Sorry-Grateful” I completely understand why Colbert was involved in this project. His affection and respect for Sondheim are well-documented and his popular appeal certainly widened the audience for the concert (particularly the cinematic release, which one must suspect was in the works when the TV-personality-heavy cast was assembled). The strength of his book scenes made his awkward and self-aware transition into song quite embarrassing.

Anika Noni Rose’s rendering of “Another Hundred People” Unlike “Sorry-Grateful” (a song that I love), I tend not to like “Another Hundred People,” but I’ve learned to like it. Her performance was certainly more professional and self-assured than Colbert’s, but was still among the weakest of the show.

I found a lot of other elements solid, but not particularly remarkable. I mostly liked Neil Patrick Harris as Bobby, preferring “Marry Me a Little” over “Being Alive” and thought Patti LuPone was good, but a little confused. I don’t usually think of Joanne as so “rough around the edges,” but I guess that comes with the territory.

I also forgot how awkward the opening scenes of the two acts are, in combination with the concluding scene (all versions of the birthday party). I get that this is a “concept musical,” a non-linear collection of scenes, but the birthday party three ways just doesn’t work for me.

Even given those weaknesses (and the two month belatedness), it’s a pretty good gift.

Colin enjoying a Spider-Man shaped ice cream treat in Central Park, Summer 2010. Consuming Spider-Man is a recurring theme for our trips to NYC.

This spring I gave Colin a choice:  We could go to Disney and Harry Potter Land (World?) in Florida for vacation, or we could return to New York City, where we’d gone for a few days in the summers of 2007 and 2010.  I was fully prepared for the seemingly obvious answer (he’d discovered and become obsessed with Harry Potter over this past long winter). But his even stronger obsession with the top-shelf selection of Star Wars toys he believes to exist only in New York won out.  He also loves swimming and is too young to understand the notion of “beach quality,” so the allure of Coney Island undoubtendly played a part as well.

So, as we did last year, we’ll be departing from Indianapolis almost immediately after the UIWP Summer Institute.  I’m sure you’re dying to know what’s on the itinerary!

• Coney Island one day, featuring lunch at Nathan’s Famous…and new this year, the afternoon at Luna Park.  I’m not positive on the height requirements, but he says he’s ready to try the Cyclone as well.  I sustained a minor physical injury on that ride back in 2009, so I look forward to injuring him as well. 
• A return trip to the American Museum of Natural History, where he enjoyed seeing the dinosaur exhibit back in ’07.  This year they have exhibits on the brain (which I’m as excited about as he is) and on sauropods, the world’s largest dinosaurs.
• A couple of smaller museums–the Transit Museum (which I’ve gone to before) is in a decomissioned subway station in Brooklyn Heights and is very cool, as well as the Fire Museum.  Oh, and probably one of the tours through the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.
• Grabbing some baked goods at allergen-free Baby Cakes bakery on the Lower East Side.  Colin has a tree-nut/peanut allergy and baked goods are often the trickiest since manufacturers can’t guarantee “no contact” even if a particular product doesn’t contain nuts.
• We’re also, somewhat against my better judgment, we’ll be taking in a show…um, Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark.  I don’t care about the quality; he’ll enjoy it.  It’s just that paying for those tickets hurt a little bit.
• And, of course, will hit the big three action figure meccas: Toys R Us in Times Square, Forbidden Planet, and Toy Tokyo.  Colin has been doing chores for the past several months to earn some extra pocket cash.  It will all be traded for imported plastic.

In the past, we’ve played in Central Park (on the agenda again, of course), took the Staten Island Ferry and visited the Statue of Liberty, gone to the top of the Empire State Building, gawked at the animals at the Bronx Zoo, and boarded the Intrepid.  Any other suggestions for a seven-year-old?

Ubiquity of literate practice is a theme that unites this week’s readings, and I was continually struck at how digital technologies such as flip cams, laptops, and iPads are supporting the advancement of such distribution of writing across diverse and divergent contexts.  As Hawisher, et al., mention, the ubiquity has always been there, but portable composition tools are changing the game in very interesting ways.  Prior and Shipka report writers who recall traces of conversation about writing in bars; they also discuss the role coffee (and lack of access to coffee) can play in writers’ processes.  This is not new—one hears stories of Shakespeare putting quill to scroll in pubs near the Globe because only public spaces could afford indoor lighting sufficient enough to write in the evening.  Similarly well-documented is the role of coffeehouses associated with the exchange of ideas between the likes of Pepys and Johnson, both for their provision of social space, but for the chemical uptick associated with caffeine.

What’s different now is the level of additional control over environment and space digital writing tools offer us.  I can take my laptop to a coffee shop to write because I want to, not because I have to (though sometimes that’s true).  If I don’t have sufficient control over my environment at home, I’m not tied to a desktop machine to compose, edit, and share my work.  In other words, I can go to the environment that allows me sufficient control over itself.  (And even if the environment isn’t completely amenable to my writing needs, digital technologies such as iPods let me control the music I listen to, and the presence of the white earphones send a strong signal that I’m there to be left alone, despite being in a nominally social space). 

Again, this isn’t completely new.  Writers have taken their books and notebooks to cafes and libraries to get things done, but the compact multifunctionality of a laptop (as Lovett and Squier note) is new.  I can do more than read research or edit or write a draft.  I can share the draft with peers through Google docs; I can publish writing on the web through WordPress.  To get a sense of the difference, imagine the awkwardness of an analogous situation from just a generation ago: a café full of tables with stacks of books and file folders for research; half-filled notebooks for invention and composing; and typewriters for preparing drafts for publication.  Possible, yes; but convenient, no.

Revisiting Prior and Shipka’s piece in conjunction with Hawisher, et al., and Lovett and Squier helps me put into theoretical perspective a phenomenon I wrote about in Mark Dressman’s class last fall.  He asked us to go somewhere and observe—then to try to make sense out of what we saw.  It was a “loose” assignment, to be sure, and one that gave me trouble after I wrote down everything the patrons at Café Espresso on Goodwin were doing for the better part of an hour.   That is, until on my way back to my car, I ducked into the Undergraduate Library to pick something up.  I noticed that the two spaces—café and library—were much more similar in social function than they had been when I was an undergraduate.  The conflation of purpose and environment is overwhelmingly attributable to the ability for digital technology to support reading and writing in contexts beyond the traditional print-bound confines.  More relaxed library rules played a part as well, but I’m certain that the decisions behind such changes were informed by the need for libraries to compete with other spaces that can offer similar access to information and support—with “groovier” atmospheres.

As empowering and freeing as these aspects of digital writing technologies can be, I want to acknowledge the way in which they can add an element of sterility and invasiveness to the concept of knotworking—“part of the normal and routine management of multiple activity footings” Shipka and Prior cite.  Having recently participated in a fairly high-stakes, deadline-driven collaborative writing project, I found myself dreading the act of checking my personal email account, knowing that at any moment my last week of summer—and into my first week of work—could be invaded with another draft, another round of comments, another passing of the e-baton.  Supported by the ease of digital composition and the speed of digital communication, I found it hard not to work because of the networked knotwork.  Yes, the laptop can support a notion as elegant and ideal as a “living pedagogy,” but it’s also the agent of constantly living requests for productivity that can get in the way of learning or recreation of a more personal, self-directed nature.

I was disappointed, though, when Pigg shares the story of Paul who first blogs and then writes a traditional paper in which he takes on the persona and rhetorical stance of a character from The Laramie Project.   She claims that his “message was changed not only by altering the medium in which he produced it, but also by changing the speaking voice, which built the ethos and constructed the writing body in a way that would appeal to a very different audience” (248).  Her analysis of the role of medium is conflated almost entirely with audience, as she observes that he “relied on direct audience address…as well as strong, inflammatory audience,” moves she contrasts with “extended research” and “elimina[tion] of conventions more suited to a blog posting” (249-50).

It seems at this point that Pigg is conflating the genre and medium.  A blog is a vehicle for communicating ideas with the potential to reach a wider audience more rapidly than an academic essay, but does it really have inherent “conventions” that imply (or even condone) direct audience address?  Does the medium of a blog really disinvite the presentation of extended research?  It seems to me that media have affordances (blogs allow for embedded digital media and hyperlinks in ways that print documents do not), but they do not have “conventions,” socially constructed boundaries and guidelines that are actually the features of genre.  I would like to have seen her dig more deeply into that distinction in seeing how and why Paul wrote differently in the two different media.  Hearing from his perspective would have been useful.

(This is a nearly unrelated quibble, but what does she mean, I wonder, by rich when she describes the out-of school digital writing she studied [234]? She uses varied immediately after, so I have to assume she’s not being redundant.  The footnote offers evidence that implies the variety, but we’re left having to accept rich and interpret what it might mean.  I’m always suspect when I see that word, often used to describe writing that happens outside of school).

I very much enjoyed our second Sorapure of the semester, though it was another frustrating read without the benefit of seeing the examples “live” as I read.  Her framework of static, animated, interactive, and dynamic will likely be one that I take up in my seminar paper on digital reading.  Stay tuned.

teachers acknowledge and learn more about the authentic and motivating nature of 1.5 Generations students’ self-selected experiences with literacy and consider those experiences an important stepping stone into formal writing instruction in school.  1.5 Generation students…can, for example, be encouraged to look for ways in which to incorporate their self-sponsored writing into more academically-oriented writing tasks or to apply more formal writing strategies and techniques to what they have previously composed outside of school. (106)

My practitioner-continuum self cringes at recommendations such as these.  First of all, they’re not specific enough to be useful.  How does a teacher “learn more about” this kind of writing?  The access granted to researchers is predicated on the understanding that the relationship is based on an attempt to understand those literacies, not to use them or change them in some way.  What does the recommended “encouragement” look like?  A passing comment when a student mentions she blogs?  An assignment?  It’s moments such as this that help me see the value in co-publication by researchers and practitioners.  Not only could such a partnership avoid recommendations that fail the authenticity sniff test, they could go a step further and provide concrete recommendations that, whether they “work” or not, are something specific enough you could imagine yourself doing (or not).

And speaking of “not,” I was surprised that Yi and Hirvela made such recommendations at all, in light of their previous framing of such literate practices as choices and their acknowledgment of the ideological hierarchy that favors school-based literacy over self-sponsored reading and writing.  They conclude that “the self-sponsored composing practices of Elizabeth…are anything but the ‘inferior attempts’ at using writing cited by Street and Street,” yet they go on to say that by bridging school and non-school writing, “self sponsored writing takes on an air of legitimacy that will empower writers like Elizabeth” (106).  Describing self sponsored writing as a “stepping stone” in need of “formalization” seems the antithesis of fuel for empowerment.

Back to Kirkland, then.  Is the “chief” role of understanding literacies in extra spaces to enhance and update the way we teach?  I guess it’s the phrase “put to better use” that bothers me so much.  If something is functioning as well as it is for Aja and Raymond, does it need school-based literacy support?  Is it all reasonable to think that the authenticity of the activities are replicable (in any way that’s above mockery) in a school setting?  The utilitarian nature of such an approach to understanding human practice leaves me cold rather than inspired to act.

Luke, in some ways, addresses a similarly utilitarian, commodifying relationship between education and the economy, scholarly work and corporate presses.  Situated within the context of Cope and Kalantzis’ commentary on the withering of the central state, Luke discusses how corporate money (and interests…and control) step in to fill the void left by withering state support for institutions of higher learning.  A related issue is Luke’s assertion that “academics essentially provide free labor to produce a product for a new breed of publishing mega-houses that stream profit revenue to shareholders not stakeholders, or reinvest fractional profit into ‘services’ that academics can no longer afford” (110).

Once I got over the brief initial shock of that notion, I realized that no one should at all be surprised by such a situation.  First, the labor isn’t exactly “free,” though I know what she means.  The monetary transaction takes place at the site of the university through salary, research versus teaching loads, and tenure agreements, so it is odd that the journals are directly profiting off that labor.  But the academy is far from the only line of production in which the lowest-level producers cannot readily afford  the end product to which they contribute.  I guess the shocking part of that sentence is the realization that academics are at the lowest level of a chain, with the corporate publishing structure superseding their importance through their ability to produce marketable versions of their intellectual product.

Such a realization does help put in perspective the need for alternative routes of publication that lead to the cache required in academia (recall Sonia’s and my presentation on Generacciones’ Narratives, for example) and the value of not-for-profit membership organizations such as NCTE that, even though their titles are accessible through subscription aggregators as well, make their journal content reasonably accessible through individual subscription and direct Web-based interfaces.

Granted, I’m not theoretically equipped to discuss philosophies of the individual, so my thinking here is more observational than anything else.  But it does seem disconcerting (is that the right word?) that Cope/Kalantzis claim that “We are returning to a deep logic of divergence and diversity not witnessed since we spoke the languages of the first globalization,” building in part on the examples of “endless television channels, streamed radio, [and] Web communities”  (372).  I use disconcerting because it seems very easy to confuse individuality with infantile selfishness when it’s framed in terms iPod and MyDirectTV (I don’t know if the latter exists…perhaps My is redundant next to Direct?).  Does putting together a playlist of the 10 favorite songs I bought from iTunes contribute to diversity?  I guess it does, in some way, but not in the way that I want to talk about diversity.

To be sure, Cope/Kalantzis do not rely on the commercial media examples alone, but when paired with Black’s study of imagination fueled by “poached” content, the idea of digital diversity seems harrowingly homogenized through the corporate media structures to which we’re so proudly reaffirming our identity-commitments.  While it was affirming to see that one participant chose to “right” the “social wrongs” in the anime series she was writing about, I think we do need to temper our use of the word imagination a bit when it is buttressed as strongly as it is by the “textual resources” of characters, plots, and situations that preexist.  (And for the record, Nanako is basing her story not just on the Western narrative of You’ve Got Mail.  That film, and several other works that use the same plot device, are adaptations of the play Parfumerie by Hungarian playwright Miklos Laszlo).

At the center of my concern, I guess, is what do we mean by diversity, individuality, and difference?  If the metrics we use are the way people adapt commercial media stories to post and dedicate to our new boyfriends and girlfriends, that worries me a little.  If we seek evidence for difference in the preponderance of television channels that are individualized only because it makes delivery of marketing messages more efficient, that worries me as well.