ePedagogy vs. eCommerce

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As I write this, I am looking at an ad from a major department store (I will leave the store unnamed so as to avoid giving it further advertisement).  I received this mini-catalogue in the mail, though I did not supply this store with my address.  In the catalogue, I am promised some kind of free gift if I pin them, follow them on tumblr, follow them on twitter, Facebook-friend them, use/view instagram, watch them on youtube, download their shopping app, and visit their blog; and these shopping suggestions are presented in a circle as if one thing cannot stand alone. All that AND a catalog mailed to my home too!  “This is just crazy” is what I first said aloud.

Needless to say, I am probably on the left end of the spectrum, always interrogating new modes of capitalism and the ways it structures thought and behavior.  Technology is never immune to the critique since new technologies make new modes of capitalism possible and vice versa. However, I am not necessarily inclined to reject all new technologies simply because they have been co-opted for hyper-consumerism. Obviously, we need to build radical community uses of digital media for our own purposes in a world that co-opts all technologies for consumerist purposes.  This seems to apply to college students especially since they are the target consumers for seemingly EVERYTHING. And that’s just my point here: we need to know when we are being co-opted.  When I meet other people of color who are suspicious of new technologies for its co-opting, I do not assume they are tech-phobes, too primitive to understand the advanced world, or merely indulging conspiracy theories.  I know that people’s histories with institutions (COINTELPRO did, after all, also use the new technologies of its time) can never be ignored. I like to hear these suspicions and analyses that keep my social observations sharp.

I think back to the first time I ever used blackboard (a learning management system bought by many colleges) in my classes circa 2000.  There were uses of it that I have always found invaluable (archiving 100s of assignments and digital texts, for example) but I never fell for the incessant, institutional dogma that insisted blackboard would save my teaching. There were two problems with this dogma for me. The first was that if we simply co-opted young people’s uses of and inclinations towards new technologies into our own curriculum and instruction (without the need to really change any of that), then we will capture their interests.  The second issue for me was this notion that students could be tricked into experiencing their classrooms as something other than impersonal, post-industrial, large lecture halls because they could post questions on blackboard (or, in today’s parlance, tweet their professor and 300 classmates).  This all seemed rather convenient to university’s budgets: there is no compelling need to rethink large lecture-based classes and, therefore, hire more tenure-track faculty, build new spaces, or create smaller learning communities.  You can just pack all the students in, make them feel like they are making real-time connections by co-opting their favorite means of social networking, and collect money from them in the process without really having to shell any out. Convenient, indeed.  This is all the more relevant when you consider Manny Marable’s argument (in Wells of Democracy) that universities (private universities, especially) often function today like Fortune 500 companies.   Convenient, indeed.

When I think of schooling’s uses of technologies, I think of scholars like Ngugi and Walter Rodney. They remind us that those students who were supposed to be the passive recipients of the empire’s models and modes came back to bite the empire in the behind with the very education that was supposed to domesticate them.  That’s all that keeps me going on those days when my college students and me are publicly asked to “brand” ourselves using new social networks. As a descendant of enslaved Africans, the legalized branding of my person and body stopped with the Emancipation Proclamation so I simply can’t see taking on this language or EVER using it with black students in a classroom.  This is when I think back to the black college students of the HBCUs who were the catalysts for a new sit-in movement (like the Greensboro Four from North Carolina AT&T on February 1, 1960 pictured at the top of this post) and a branch and method of Civil Rights protests that perhaps no one foresaw: black college students who questioned the ways their bodies and minds were socially patrolled as part and parcel of a new kind of educational curricula that they shaped and defined for themselves.  I find hope for the future looking at these patterns of the past.

I tend to get worried when I am simply expected to plug in information into an institution’s pre-determined templates where my needs, social-political purposes, linguistic designs, vernacular imaginations, and aesthetic philosophies are never consulted or regarded.  Even though I get worried, I always remember how domestication, co-opting, and colonizing never fully work, never really take with color-conscious people (the term I use to mark a politics distinct from color-blindness).  Capitalism tends to contradict itself and that’s where those little fissures of new possibility get magnified.  A blind allegiance to the kind of eCommerce awaiting me in my mailbox won’t ever be the full picture.  A radical ePedagogy for people of color will always be possible as long as we do what we have always done: question the how and why of what institutions do.

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Self-Taught! (Part II: In Memory of Spottswood Rice)

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Today, I fell in love …with the internet. I returned to a letter written by a soldier for the Union Army, Spottswood Rice, that I first read more than ten years ago in Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African American Kinship in the Civil War Era by Ira Berlin and Leslie Rowland.  In the letter, Rice (who learned to read and write as a slave by tricking his young “master”) leaves no stone unturned in letting a slave-mistress know what he has in mind if she continues to refuse to give him his child (who she believes is her property.)  By visiting Angela Walton-Raji’s blog, I participated in Walton-Raji’s archival research that witnesses the life of this man and his family. Her website allowed me to finally fill in the picture that Rice’s letter gave me when I first read it more than 10 years ago.

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Self-Taught! (Part I: African American Union Soldiers)

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In the second week of class, we will focus on Heather Andrea Williams’s book, Self-Taught, with the goal of framing African American Literacies in the 20th and 21st century in this crucial history.

We will begin class by discussing Williams’s work more fully.  But we will also spend part  of this class focusing on the role of African American Union Soldiers during the Civil War as a critical aspect of the history of African American Literacies.

There are, of course, so many intriguing literate characters, literacy events, and teaching moments that we could highlight from Williams’s book:

  • The role of black children themselves, many of whom were born into slavery but who experienced freedom AS the ability to learn to read and write OPENLY (children who would also “read” white paternalism alongside their books, given the ways they would trick northern, white missionaries who couldn’t tell them apart and, thus, report that their names were things like General Lee and Stonewall Jackson)
  • Teachers who crafted their literacy pedagogies and community teachings in hiding during slavery and showed up in full, visible force at emancipation
  •  Black women’s day-planning, all of whom were formerly enslaved, who became “stay-at-home moms” for the first time, solely for the purpose of learning to read and write and attending school with their children
  • the whole arsenal of skills-building underneath all of that financial literacy that let recently emancipated people who made less than $10 a month buy the materials to build their own schools and take care of the teachers (which included physical defense as much as monetary support)
  • the re-organization/re-scripting of menial work, work that looked no different from what black people had done in slavery, by taking every and any free moment or many turns with the plow to get in a quick lesson from the infamous blue-back speller (which became popular, no doubt, in part from emancipated slaves’  extensive use of this  text, a text with the central goal of replacing British English with an American English)
  • the imparting of the communal philosophy of “each one, teach one” to design the teaching of reading and writing (where even small children were considered masterful teachers and expected to share knowledge)

All of these and more could be a point of focus for Williams’s book.  Unfortunately, we can only focus in closely on one aspect.  So we will spend class time looking at one iteration of the literacies that the blue-back speller witnessed: letters and petitions written by black Union soldiers to various commanders and administration;  letters from wives and family members of soldiers to various commanders and administration; letters from soldiers to wives and family and vice versa. Williams compels us to see these African American Union soldiers in the Civil War as ushering in new definitions of literacy: both how one acquires literacy, why, and to what ends.

We will look at a few spaces, directed at teachers, where we can find the online writings of black Union soldiers.  Though these texts are invaluable, these texts have been heavily edited and altered.  While I understand scholars’ decision to do this because they don’t want audiences to assume these men’s ignorance, the editing obscures the histories of literacy that Williams lets us see.  When you begin to realize that for many of these soldiers, they had only been LEGALLY ALLOWED to read and write for less than a year, all of those editing “mistakes” are indications of heroism, not failures to learn mechanics. In class, we will instead use the documentary histories that Ira Berlin, et al have created so that we can see these black men’s actual words, spellings, etc.  From that, with Williams’s research as our guide, we will get a sense of who may have learned to read and write as former slaves and/or as soldiers.  Most crucial, however, is that we have a living testimony and voice of the men and families who pushed the United States much further than it ever intended to go when it enlisted black men and abolished slavery.

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What Time Is It?

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If I could become any kind of new media composer today, I would be the AfroDigital version of Jimmy Jam (a name I have always adored) and Terry Lewis, with every and anything that would entail, all the bells and whistles that we have come to expect from them and all the new surprises awaiting us, and just when we thought they were done!  If you grew up listening to the SOS Band, Cherrelle, Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation, Klymaxx, and, of course, the Time (and so many others), then you might have a sense of what I am getting at here.  I know that their music doesn’t translate simply as a digital movement, but it is their collaborative presence that I have in mind: what I thought of, way back when, as my generation’s version of Ashford and Simpson (who fueled the music of Tammi Terrell and Marvin Gaye, Chaka Khan, and so many others.)  You just know when you are in the presence of these folks’s creations which seem to take on a life of their own for many moons to come.  I think that’s what digital spaces have to offer black communities: a unique AND African-Americanized presence that you come to know and incorporate into how you live your life.

I think about digital presence a lot lately, moreso than before, because I am more conscious of the digital spaces that I inhabit.  Immediate, in-time interactivity like twitter is sometimes important to me, but not always.  Even digital texts that are not updated can offer me multiple experiences, voices, and mental images vs. the usual, calcified and static repository of non-dynamic texts.

Here are some texts that I have come to enjoy because every time I enter them, I am, in fact, ENTERING something, becoming part of someone’s/something’s dynamism. Though the text doesn’t really change, I am still offered a new experience, a new way of hearing and seeing, each time I enter.

Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s “Polymorphous Perversity in Texts”, in the summer 2012 issue (16.3) of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy offers me a way of thinking about academic research and writing where the ideas just literally jump out at you.  On top of that, Johnson-Eilola even offers an 89 MB zipped archive for readers/players/co-imaginers to go off and play some more.


I was inspired by this collaborative movement (movement is the best word I have because text just doesn’t seem expansive enough).  This movement represents a course called “English 696e: Spatial and Visual Rhetorics” at the University of Arizona. The collaboration of amy c. kimme tea, adrienne crump & elise verzosa, crystal n. fodrey, anita further archer, jennifer haley-brown, ashley j. holmes, marissa m. juarez, londie t. martin, and jenna vinson allows you to see the work of a classroom as a relational space of understanding, conflicts, and contradictions so that we can now EXPERIENCE a whole range of perspectives.  I can’t imagine a better entry point into a classroom and its composing.

I like the possibilities that such digital texts offer me.  In my ideal world, I would re-mix all of this with a Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis vibe.  It is only when I imagine the kind of new knowledge-making that Johnson-Eilola and English 696e’s collaboration make possible, alongside the presence and worlds that black cultural icons like Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis have created, that I can imagine any reason and purpose for building digital competencies, code fluency, and tech skills.

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