Depeche Mode + Cool Hand Luke = Something Near a Reflection

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Depeche Mode + Cool Hand Luke = Something Near a Reflection

I haven’t known how to start this reflection, it’s my third attempt; then I heard it calling, calling my name, my own Personal Jesus. It’s what New Literacy Studies could be for so many lonely student souls out there.

Alright, maybe Depeche Mode is a little too dramatic of an example but there are certain times in a semester when that duck quacks.

Allow me to temper this introduction to my reflection with a few admissions of personal character traits I am infamous for. I’m known to violate several of the seven sins a day and to be difficult, sensitive, prideful, and almost always insensitive to others and brusque (I blame my parents) but even a broken clock is right twice a day! I knew so many of my instructors have had it wrong when it comes to teaching! I mean, it’s so obvious to me and anyone else who has taken Literacy Studies with Kim Jaxon just how bad or good teaching can or should be. Hell, it’s easy for any student to identify the teachers that treat you like a check mark on a roll sheet versus the ones who facilitate higher learning. The thing is that it’s been extra difficult for me with my character blemishes to accept the treatment of the less than stellar teachers as the status quo. Call it a failure to communicate.

Those teachers with whom i have had difficulty in understanding know who I am too. Either you get me at one hundred percent effort, performing difficult acts of academia to garner your approval or you get the C effort side of me. The student who drags his feet through all of your teaching practices, the student who is well versed in the manifesto of minimum effort; adept at subversive rhetoric – accomplished even – a rebellious student since the age of twelve. It’s never been the cleverest way of advocating for my academic career but it is my way and damn it if I don’t think my way is right! (I’ll simmer down now) It’s never been personal mind you, but it’s always been about a failure to understand one another, a failure to communicate.

Isn’t that what is at the heart of literacy studies? Attempting to never fail to communicate rather than just attempting to communicate? Isn’t that what Moje preaches to us? Isn’t that what Gee teaches to us? Is it not what Street shows us? And isn’t it what Brandt wants us to understand so that we don’t have those failures to communicate?

Moje advocates for better communication of literacy studies by encouraging “education [to] be as much about learning to be metadiscursive as it is about teaching conventional codes and scripts (Moje, 4).” That means that students should be taught to communicate, cooperate and cohabitate with one another’s points of view. You can’t accomplish this by just opening a book, reading it and writing an essay or thesis. That isn’t going to accomplish metadiscursivity; it’s not that easy. You do not develop “access to many different literacies because readers and writers can understand the different discourses that authors bring to bear on a text or can produce such discourses themselves (Moje, 4).” You have to advocate for better teaching technologies to create digital communities where students advocate for their educations and themselves.

Gee teaches us how to teach better by directing us to obvious systems of learning that work like those found in the professional, scientific and video game world.  He roots his practices in practicing a “real world” style of hypothesizes, experimentation and solution. Group participation and cooperation is central to this “real world” type of learning system and in this way cooperation in groups is essential to good learning practices. Good learning allows for cooperation between its participants to form groups. This approach to problem solving (and education) allows each individual to augment their potential weaknesses through other group member’s potential strengths. This also fosters metadiscursivity and ensures less failures in communication as students develop.

Hammering a crooked nail into the coffin of this reflection I will speed through what is a thoroughly kicked and dead horse in Brandt and Street. By understanding our accumulated literacy practices through Brandt as well as our concepts of knowledge rooted in identity and being through Street, future educators should be able to realize the incredible potential to not only build upon personal and individual interests in their students’ literacy practices but also the incredible potential to bridge the gaps between them. By garnering metadiscursivity through successful communication and cooperation future students will be more likely to discover how much they have in common rather than not.

I wanted to be a teacher once. Then I spent four years with teachers. Taking this class has rekindled that interest for me. I am so close to finishing my English Studies degree though that it will have to wait. I want to complete at least one voyage before I set my course for another.

I am going to finish this reflection the same way I started it; with personal admonishment and appreciation and just a touch of admiration for others. I am not a teacher and so I will boast little, but when I still wanted to be an instructor I was planning on teaching in a new way. I was going to practice all the things that I have seen work in my own personal experience and purge those short-sighted and traditional practices. I would encourage my students to be clever and to work their ways around problems while letting them know core principles I needed them to accomplish in order to pass them. I would garner community engagement by eliminating division and giving students a common goal, task and group identity while rewarding individual accomplishments that aided in that achievement. I planned to tailor personal challenges to students within the framework of their group and individual assignments in order to foster as much personal growth as possible. I may not have known the technical grounds for these practices, but I knew them to be necessarily better.

I could not have asked for a more gifted, more competent, or more willing instructor then Kim Jaxon to educate a difficult student like myself in the Art of Literacy. I am most grateful for the employment of Professor Jaxon at this humble institution. I think this class is what I will remember most of all when I look back on my education following my graduation next semester. Maybe, it’s because her and I have never had a failure to communicate.

POST SCRIPT: When’s the final for this class? hahaha. Seriously though, I have no idea and need to know.

POST POST SCRIPT: Furthermore, I have said a great deal more about my understanding of Literacy Practices in my other postings and projects. To repeat them here would be redundant and would devalue the effort of the work done previously as well as make this reflection less interesting. For a more complete and in depth assessment of my understanding of literacy please regard those previous posts and projects that I have shared at http://kimjaxon.com/engl332/.