Alienating Apparatuses: Behind the Scenes of the Neoliberal Academic Assemblage (original) (raw)
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This project is framed by a dilemma: representations of teaching practice are critical in teacher education, and yet the representations we rely on dangerously oversimplify teaching. My central questions emerge from this dilemma. In telling stories about teaching, how messy can the story be before it becomes unintelligible? Why does messiness matter and what does it produce for teachers-to-be? After examining both canonical accounts of teacher knowledge and emergent research that is productively disrupting the field, I draw on the work of Karen Barad to help me imagine both a new way of telling teaching stories, what I call diffractive storytelling, and a new way of thinking about their use in teacher education. In particular, I take up Barad’s concept of apparatus to consider what knowing is made possible by traditional teacher stories, what knowing is foreclosed, and what these possibilities and limitations mean for teacher education. Finally, I turn to other apparatuses at work in teacher education, especially standardized assessments such as edTPA, the new performance-based assessment of teacher readiness being implemented across the country. I argue that attending carefully to the apparatus-ness of the instruments used in teacher preparation allows us to contest the naturalization of narrow conceptions of teaching practice and sustains the paradox of holding to standards while resisting standardization.
Beyond the scope of this paper: Troubling writing across paradigms in education dissertations
International Review of Qualitative Research
While qualitative researchers include reflexive analyses about their research processes in publications, they are generally less forthcoming about their writing processes. Here we suggest that reflection on the thinking that happens in the writing process itself is a key analytic practice researchers can use to understand and transform the world. We invite readers to examine with us how productivity as a discourse in doctoral education relegates the act of writing to just another task to be completed, one more stage within the hierarchical processes of what we call PhDness.
Hidden in Plain Sight: Occlusion in Pedagogical Genres
2016
Occluded genres in academia work "behind the scenes" to support and develop an academic's professional identity. However, while significant attention has been paid to occluded genres that support an academic's identity as a researcher, very little scholarship examines how occlusion operates in genres of pedagogy, such as the syllabus, teaching statement, or assignment prompt. These genres promote and endorse an academic's teacherly identity, not only by expressing a teacher's authority and expertise in the classroom, but also by representing a teacher's pedagogical philosophy, activity, and experience in other academic scenarios beyond the classroom. In this article, I explore the characteristics of occlusion associated with these genres as well as the implications faced when their rhetorical complexity is obscured by that occlusion. Ultimately, I argue for an increased awareness and study of the occluded contexts of pedagogical genres so that we may be...
2016
Maid there is still time for the general public to wake up and stop the forces destroying the great public universities. Yet, while that battle is being waged at the national political macro-level, folks in Writing Studies can still work at their own local and disciplinary micro-levels. The title of this volume is apt. All of higher education, if not all of society, has become a minefield. Still, if we pay attention to the narratives related here, Writing Studies faculty, no matter where they are organizationally located, can continue to teach their students successfully. However, they must pay attention. It is imperative that they define themselves as Writing Studies, and carefully educate all their constituencies both inside and outside their institutions who they are and what they do. They should be defined positively as Writing Studies and not negatively as "not English." I also think, and again this is shown in the chapters in this collection, that Writing Studies faculty need to be both flexible and pragmatic. The reality is that higher education does need to change-though not in the ways that we seem to be moving. We, and all of society, would be better served if higher education were not seen as being separate from the rest of society but more fully integrated into it. Writing Studies, especially when it is independent and controls its own destiny, is positioned to help be a part of that change. As the authors in this collection have stated, we can't always get exactly what we want. However, we can, when we take chances and are willing to do some things differently, positively impact the perceptions which surround our field and even more importantly improve the education of our students. Fourteen years after the publication of A Field of Dreams, we put out a call for chapters for a collection that we hoped would demonstrate a growing maturity in the field of independent writing programs and departments, which have not only been increasing in number, but flourishing and achieving the equity with English (as Lalicker reports in his chapter in this book). However, the chapters we received tell a much more nuanced story. While there certainly have been place of writing within the university structure, the positioning of first-year writing program, the role of writing across the curriculum, and relationships with former (usually English) departments. Thus, Jennifer Johnson examines how composition and literature TA training in an independent writing program matters significantly in mitigating disciplinary divides. A very different TA story comes from W. Brock MacDonald, Margaret Procter, and Andrea L. Williams, who describe an alternative writing program (Writing Instruction for Teaching Assistants or WIT) that has proved successful in a Canadian context; in this case, graduate instructors coming from a variety of departments are trained to provide writing instruction at the University of Toronto. Georgia Rhoades, Kim Gunter and Elizabeth Carroll remind us of how much work there is still to do for independent writing programs to find a place of their own: they describe the effortful, ongoing saga of their writing program at Appalachian State University, which they describe as "balancing rhetoric from above and below"; their chapter documents their process of enlisting non-tenure-track faculty in writing (in more ways than one) the fate of the department and of the university. Finally, Chris Thaiss, Sarah Perrault, Katharine Rodger, Eric Schroeder, and Carl Whithaus argue that the writing program is "part of the fabric of the university" by providing a comprehensive narrative of the University Writing Program at the University of California-Davis, which displays strong WAC/WID roots and great insights for those interested into developing professional writing majors. All essays explore themes of disciplinarity, labor, and professionalization, which are consequential for the place of writing in the university. techne: Methods We eMploy Cicero's On the Orator features a long dialogue discussing whether a rhetorician needs only to have skill in the techniques of public speaking or if specific disciplinary knowledge is also required. In the current era writing teachers have often been confronted with the notion that they are teaching a mere general education skill devoid of disciplinary subject matter. By focusing primarily on pedagogical research, Downs and Wardle argue, "our field reinforces cultural misconceptions of writing instead of attempting to educate students and publics out of those misconceptions" and thus "silently support the misconceptions that writing is not a real subject" (2007, p. 553). The "Writingabout-Writing" model is one attempt to address this criticism and establish for Writing Studies a subject matter recognizable to outsiders. In addition to this, our field draws upon the rich and ancient history of rhetoric as well as popular culture, technical/professional communication, and other areas. All the same, Hairston, M. (1985). Breaking our bonds and reaffirming our connections. College Composition and Communication, 36, 272-82. Hindman, J. E. (2002). Learning as we g(r)o(w): Strategizing the lessons of a fledgling rhetoric and writing department. In P. O'Neill, A. Crow & L. Burton (Eds.), A field of dreams: Independent writing programs and the future of composition studies (pp.
Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Drawing on a qualitative case study of writing practices and pedagogies in one Canadian graduate Education program, this article discusses roles and responsibilities of course instructors for teaching and supporting academic writing at the master’s level. Data were collected through individual, semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 14 graduate students and eight professors and they were analyzed thematically. The discussion is framed by the academic literacies pedagogical framework (ACLITS). The data suggest that academic writing expectations can be sources of extreme stress for graduate students. The students and instructors lacked a common language to discuss student texts. In the absence of explicit academic writing pedagogies, students and instructors sometimes turned to simplistic advice received at school. The paper also discusses pedagogical challenges associated with the teaching of disciplinary writing genres in multi-perspectival fields such as Curriculum Studies. Dans...
Doing Academia Differently: Loosening the Boundaries of Our Disciplining Writing Practices
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2021
In this article, I explore questions of pedagogy and knowledge-writing practices in their relation to knowledge production. Starting from the observation that different styles of writing are present in our work, but many of them are systematically pushed back and mis-read as non-academic, the article brings to the fore a discussion on the direct relationship between practices of knowledge-writing and those modes of knowing that escape the linear and propositional academic style while still being part of how knowledge comes into being. Following a tradition of intersectional feminist epistemologies, I engage with questions of epistemologies and critical pedagogies, speaking to and with several generations of scholars who address and work with questions of diversity and knowledge production that are seminal within International Relations (IR), yet underexplored from the perspective of knowledge-writing practices.
“Not a Thing but a Doing”: Reconsidering Teacher Knowledge through Diffractive Storytelling
2015
This project is framed by a dilemma: representations of teaching practice are critical in teacher education, and yet the representations we rely on dangerously oversimplify teaching. My central questions emerge from this dilemma. In telling stories about teaching, how messy can the story be before it becomes unintelligible? Why does messiness matter and what does it produce for teachers-to-be? After examining both canonical accounts of teacher knowledge and emergent research that is productively disrupting the field, I draw on the work of Karen Barad to help me imagine both a new way of telling teaching stories, what I call diffractive storytelling, and a new way of thinking about their use in teacher education. In particular, I take up Barad's concept of apparatus to consider what knowing is made possible by traditional teacher stories, what knowing is foreclosed, and what these possibilities and limitations mean for teacher education. Finally, I turn to other apparatuses at work in teacher education, especially standardized assessments such as edTPA, the new performance-based assessment of teacher readiness being implemented across the country. I argue that attending carefully to the apparatus-ness of the instruments used in teacher preparation allows us to contest the naturalization of narrow conceptions of teaching practice and sustains the paradox of holding to standards while resisting standardization.