Another Bad Sports Metaphor

I was watching the NCAA march madness games this week while I was writing a conference paper. There is this urgency that you can see in basketball players when the final seconds tick away, and I felt somewhat the same as the deadline for my paper crept forward. The players start fumbling with the ball, missing easy shots, making stupid mistakes because it seems like they can’t keep up with the pace. In the final seconds of one game, I saw a player drive to the basket and just trip out of bounds. I felt bad for that guy, and I also felt like that guy. My game is rhetoric and composition: trying to understand language and keep up with language. I am always behind, and every paper seems to be some sort of stumble out of bounds at the deadline. I just can’t keep track of language’s evolution, and that’s why I love this game.

In accordance with Bakhtin’s ideas regarding evolution of discourse and Bizzell’s notions of hybrid/mixed discourse, language is not static. Even between Bizzell’s two articles, she noticed that she was not fully comprehending how contact zones are operate in discourses and that “academic discourse has continuously evolved over time” (215). Bizzell was on the right track in referring Lyon’s “Contact Heteroglossia” in that discourse is an explosive intersection of texts & experiences that are constantly mixing and reforming. But Bizzell first article (“Hybrid Academic Discourse”) is right in pursuing the change that is occurring in the academy. Academic language ain’t just some old dead white guy’s language anymore; it is changing because the social dynamics of our world are changing. My question for Bizzell is whether she is making a space in mixed discourses for visuals and online/digital virtual spaces. She seems focus on linguistic text, and part of mixing discourses is mixing modalities.

What interested me with Gee’s chapter 7 is his discussion on the new capitalism and the millennial generation. I always thought shape-shifters were weird superhero folk, and apparently we are teaching these creepy shifters. I do feel immersed in a superficial, new capitalist generation. As I have been reading Rebekah Nathan’s "My Freshman Year: what a professor learned by becoming a student" (a sociologist’s ethnography of undergraduate life as she enrolls as a college freshmen and notes current transitional issues that arise in this generation of undergraduates), she has claimed that the academy is a place where students perform but do not feel they necessarily deem as a hub of learn. Nathan says:

"The undergraduate worldview [. . .] linked intellectual matters with in-class domains and other formal areas of college life, including organized clubs and official dorm programs. ‘real’ college culture remained beyond the reach of university institutions and personnel, and centered on the small, ego-based networks of friends that defined one’s personal and social world. Academic and intellectual life thus had a curiously distant relation to college life [. . .] While most students [she] interviewed readily admitted that they were in college to learn, they also made clear that classes, and work related to classes, were a minor part of what they were learning [. . .] the great majority of students saw elective social activities and interpersonal relationships as the main context for learning.” (100-101)

So if the academy has become a superficial world, does the academy then become a more pedagogically friendly place—allowing for more virtual social spaces and less rigorous gatekeeping—or is the academy becoming such a certification-centered place that it is quickly becoming obsolete. I mean, we can already get degrees over the internet; is a new form of the academy on the horizon?

Despite all my big talk on how I want non-discursive forms in the composition classroom and how I want technology as a central mainframe for pedagogy, I do fear that English composition will become so technologized that the English department will become the Technical Writing department (and technical writing will just be offered as minor or a certification). All I got to say is keep those kids reading Harry Potter and promote strong literate models for narratives in video games.