In his section “Differences in Value (As in, “Is It Any Good?”), Lessig brings up a conversation with programmer Victor Stone of ccMixter. Stone told Lessig, “As the boomers die out, and they get over themselves by dying, the generation that follows... just doesn’t care about this discussion. They just assume that remixing is a part of music, and it’s part of the process, and that’s it.” (97).
Students’ Right To Their Own Language deals with voice and dialect, with reference to cultural disparities, regional differences (or trends, to avoid the difference), and mutual acceptance. To follow Lessig’s rationale of regulatory humility, one reason that students’ writing would ideally be accepted on the student’s terms is that educators are worn down by the task of compressing the words of a student into an academically acceptable form. In the future, to pirate Stone’s words above, students may believe they can remix their cultural voices with a median form of English (the one traditionally taught) to produce a more personal and varied writing form. Most educators would, I suspect, consider this an ideal.
Academic English and Standard English are different forms, to my mind, but here are my arguments.
It concerns me that Standard English carries little merit in this SRTOL document. If we look at Standard American English, for example, as a pigeonhole into which to cram the next generation’s language, then I agree that standard is a hegemonic tool. (That’s what standard means.) I offer a contrary that could be just as much an ideal hope: that a standard English is already a hybrid, a remix, and an evolving voice. It’s the voice that will be known to readers, appealing to employers both domestic and overseas, and expressive of the writer’s own thought process—with academic overtones and a constant attempt to make oneself understood (or at least intelligible) to the greatest possible audience.
The other argument I hear sounds defeated or at least decommissioned: I don’t care what students write as long as they are writing. That’s the best we can hope for at present. Get them excited about anything, and maybe they’ll have the tools to apprehend the material we want them to read and write.
Several students in our own class this semester, starting with Amber, expressed a fear of appearing to try to be hip to technology in teaching. That would be a good start, as far as our future classes are concerned. It’s not so bad to be the teacher lady or teacher fellow, and media is only as good as the material presented. If it’s only a slideshow of pictures of authors, they should be good pictures. If it’s a flashy presentation with four senses engaged and fades that stop short of cliché, that won’t save the presentation from a cruddy subject.
It’s easy to point out that language and media are different—in that human language, spoken or written, is a direct reference language, whereas media, whether spoken word, soybean ink on gray recycled paper, an Ignite slideshow, or a documentary posted to the public, are not languages but vehicles for language. The confluence of the two categories is the end-user of each medium, the communicator. I’ll always be a fan of the written word and the speech; I’ll be an advocate for those two skills above others, because somebody has to support each specific category. The art of speech has fallen a good deal farther behind the curve today than the art of writing.
Digital media increasingly represents students’ earliest exposures to communication. I believe that guardians still teach reading and writing first, but when kids learn on their own, for those hours a day when they are not directly instructed, I believe that most of their engagement with the world of vicarious language is entailed by digital media. It’s not regulatory humility to acknowledge and appreciate the medium which conveys the world to, as Lessig would say, “our kids.” I brought up Paulo Freire a couple of times in class, and in his work, bringing the great big world to the people through the word is the first step to getting the word of the people out into the world. What a right to their own language, the right to “own” language, would look like for students in 2011 begins with admitting, for guys like me, that we can learn more and faster from digital media than from the average book, with its linear writing and plodding, cajoling text.
This recalls the end of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’ “Farewell Letter” published in Peru’s La Marioneta on 29 May 2000. “I have learned that a man has the right to look down on somebody, only when he is helping him to stand up.”
As a short archive on Marxist pedagogy, this page from the Marxists Internet Archive at the Australian National University offers good resources, especially on Leo Vygotsky.
http://marxists.anu.edu.au/subject/education/
This conference paper by educator Rich Gibson makes a good introduction for the work of Freire.
Gibson, Rich, Associate Professor of Education. “Paolo Freire and Revolutionary Pedagogy for Social Justice.” San Diego State University.
http://www.pipeline.com/~rougeforum/freirecriticaledu.htm
From Democracy and Governance, this is a strong summary of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and an accompanying study.
http://www.comminit.com/en/node/27123/348
In the spirit of debate, see Sol Stern’s retrospective on Freire’s influence, which claims that “Freire’s ideas are harmful not just to students but to the teachers entrusted with their education.” Stern claims that Freirian education had no demonstrable impact on the third world, and that today’s teachers “will surely learn nothing about becoming better instructors” from Pedagogy of the Oppressed’s “discredited Marxist platitudes.”
Stern, Sol. “Pedagogy of the Oppressor.” City Journal 19.2 (Spring 2009). Available 14 Feb 2011,
http://city-journal.org/2009/19_2_freirian-pedagogy.html
For a tutorial this week, I wanted to share how I get away with driving so much.
First, I downloaded this free text-to-speech .mp3 maker.
http://www.naturalreaders.com/index.htm
My students email me their rough drafts. I feed my students’ rough drafts into this reader which converts them into .mp3 format, read by the voice of Microsoft’s “Paul.”
While I’m driving to work, I play these files.
For entertainment, I also download Project Gutenberg’s free human-read audiobooks, linked here.
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/1
There are even more read by a computer, but after listening to the computerized version of my students’ essays, I can’t stand the fake voice. It’s interesting, though, how the necessarily flat reading by the computer resembles reading more nearly than the personal inflection of a professional reader.
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