I am going to Southwest Texas Popular Culture Association and I am going to blog it.

Update: I am blogging it, but it is taking a lot more time than I expected to put my notes into order.  Maybe I should have blogged in situ.

Our students may have a different culture than we do, but it may not be as visible as the differences as the picture of these women of the Samburu tribe show. It may not be visible at all. But it could still be there.

Most college professors came from the middle class or the upper class. There are very few college professors who came from generational poverty. But many students, especially in the community colleges but even in large universities, come from generational poverty and are attempting to escape from it. They recognize that education is essential, even when they don’t know how education “works.”

As teachers, we can also be the facilitators for their entry into the academic community, by making clear what the mores and customs are. Why do we need to do that? Because they aren’t from our America. They didn’t grow up learning these things.

Dr. Ruby K. Payne grew up middle class and married someone from generational poverty. In an attempt to better understand her husband she did her graduate research on the differences between the classes. As a result of that, she is the leading expert in the US on the mindsets of generational poverty, middle class, and wealth.

Some notes from Ruby Payne:

“Hidden rules are unspoken cues and habits of a group. Distinct cueing systems exist between and among groups and economic classes. Generally in America this notion is clearly recognized for racial and ethnic groups but not for economic class” (58).

“When there are limited material things, and life is about survival, then virtually the only possession one has is people. And when people become possessions, the rules change. That’s why the physical fights over people are so intense- the person is a possession. That’s why being educated is often feared in generational poverty because when people get educated they usually leave [emphasis mine-ed.]. That’s why the put-downs for getting training or getting educated are so intense from those who come out of generational poverty” (60).

She means here that it the put-downs are intense toward the people who are getting educated or getting the training from the people who are not doing those things, if the two sets of people are in generational poverty. I would argue that it is the main reason students from low SES groups drop out of college. First generation immigrants from Asian countries do not, for example, because their culture is different, not because their families are richer.

“Six aspects of language affect the ability of a person to ‘listen’ in the workplace: verbal/non-verbal, concrete to abstract, language registers, discourse patterns, story structure, and ability to formulate questions” (90).

If our students have different verbal and non-verbal cues and ways of listening, if they do not understand our examples because of the ways we tell stories, and they can’t formulate questions as we do, they are in trouble. We can help them. We just have to know what their issues are.

“In poverty, the most important information tends to be conveyed non-verbally” (91).

“.. the structure of a story is different, depending on the use of casual or formal register. In formal register, a story is told from the beginning ot the end with cause, effect, and sequence by time. The story revolves around a plot- what happened. In casual register (this is what is used in gossip), one starts at the end first. Then episodes or vignettes are shared, along with spontaneous comments from the listeners” (95).

Our students may write a narrative in the casual register, especially if they are from generational poverty, because that is how stories are told in their experience. If we want them to tell them a different way, we need to be explicit about the rules.

Payne, Ruby K. and Don L. Krabill. Hidden Rules of Class at Work. Highlands, TX: aha! Process, Inc., 2002.

Some notes not from Payne:
It is not common for class-disadvantaged students to take advantage of the learning tool that the internet can be (Rothbaum, Martland, and Jannsen).     

Rothbaum, Fred, Nancy Martland, and Joanne Beswick Jannsen. “Parents’ Reliance on the Web to Find Information about Children and Families: Socio-economic Differences in Use, Skills and Satisfaction.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 29.2 (March 2008): 118-28.

The key to effective cross-cultural communication is knowledge. First, it is essential that people understand the potential problems of cross-cultural communication, and make a conscious effort to overcome these problems. Second, it is important to assume that one’s efforts will not always be successful, and adjust one’s behavior appropriately.

For example, one should always assume that there is a significant possibility that cultural differences are causing communication problems, and be willing to be patient and forgiving, rather than hostile and aggressive, if problems develop. One should respond slowly and carefully in cross-cultural exchanges, not jumping to the conclusion that you know what is being thought and said

from the University of Colorado

Since I had never had any classes on teaching digital literacy and no one else at my college was teaching digital literacy, most of these questions I worked through either by myself or by looking online.

One place I looked was the journals at school, which is where I found this.

“Teaching Digital Rhetoric: Community, Critical Engagement, and Application”
Pedagogy – Volume 6, Issue 2, Spring 2006, pp. 231-259 –Article
Course topics included exploring the history of the Internet and the World Wide Web; doing digital research, searching the Web, and thinking about information literacy; interrogating digital literacies (including a focus on reading and writing in digital spaces, dynamics of print and digital publishing, and video-game literacies); examining issues of access and divides (specifically focusing on race, class, and economies, and also on dis/abilities and usability); researching the histories of Internet economies; exploring the dynamics of digital ownership and issues of authoring, authority, and intellectual property in computer-mediated, networked spaces; exploring digital culture jamming1 and internetworked politics; examining issues of digital identity (including emphases on gender and online communities); exploring digital visual rhetorics; examining new media; and thinking about cyborg, biotech, and digital bodies. Course topics and readings were designed to equip students to
explore and understand digital spaces as deeply rhetorical spaces;
understand the sociocultural dynamics of digital writing spaces;
better understand the multiple and layered elements of digital writing conventions and digital documents;
become more sophisticated navigators of the information available in digital spaces; and become more effective writers and communicators in digitally mediated spaces.

Then, to get my mind going, I found a list of hard questions for teachers who teach blogging. While some of them are blogging specific, others apply to any teaching of writing.

What do you do about the student who is on-line more (has that luxury) doing stronger work than the student who has less experience with being on-line?
…
How do we help the student who isn’t getting beyond Internet chat language in his/her comments?
…
How do you teach students to have voice when it seems that no-one is listening; example a student writes 3-5 really thoughtful posts and receives 0 comments.

This post actually made a big difference in the design of my English composition course. First of all, I made sure I started at the very beginning (a very good place to start, h/t Mary Poppins) and I actually assign comments as part of their writing. This has made a big difference, I think, to the quality of the discussion online.

I found this work from UNC work interesting. It is a UNC English class guidelines for reading, analyzing, and creating a blog, then describing a blog community

This is
apparently another English class on blogging. This one is group blogging, with collaborative writing by students, but uses individual grades. It includes a discussion of discourse community.
The class requires
an annotated bibliography,
a movie review for IMDb, and
a book review for Amazon.

I thought these were good ideas but I have not yet implemented them. I could easily, though. They would make good assignments for when I am out of pocket at conferences.

UT Austin’s Computer Writing lab,
has an introduction to the theory for using blogging in class: very theoretical, but lots of assignment ideas.

A Texas Tech teacher wrote about an unsuccessful blogging attempt within the classroom and why it failed. The main reason I noted was that there were no post requirements. I definitely took that to heart.

Unfortunately, on the net, information often disappears. I tell my students all the time that if they find something good, they should copy or print it right then so that they will have it. On a page that is no longer available I found a thoughtful list on the kinds of literacy skills students can develop from writing about one topic from multiple sources (synthesizing reading too), specifically involving computer research.

Consider the literacy skills necessary all by themselves, without any further involvement:
reading for comprehension
understanding cause and effect
organizing and classifying information
using tables of contents and indexes to locate information
restate facts, summarize main ideas
connect prior knowledge to new information in a text
distinguish between fact and opinion in informational text
prepare a document using technology
gather evidence in support of a thesis
use Standard Written English
demonstrate understanding of correct spelling, punctuation, and other writing conventions
apply appropriate manuscript conventions
support assertions using examples, facts, and relevant details
edit and proofread using an editing checklist
integrate quotations into a text
synthesize information from multiple sources

This research list indicates that we are teaching our students information literacy and using computers to do it, not simply teaching technology in the classroom. And I don’t want to simply teach technology in the classroom. I want to enrich the writing experience with technology, take advantage of technology, and let the students use technology well.

Top Ten Reasons Writers Should Blog include
A blog can become a writing workshop. Comments and linking allow immediate feedback on the poetry, articles and other types of posts presented by bloggers to their readers. Sometimes comments become the basis for extended online conversations about a given work or topic.

Build a writing portfolio. A blog can serve as an addition to a writer’s professional portfolio. The content and theme of a blog will influence how well it can be applied to this purpose. If a writer is going to spend the time building a public blog, it serves them well to view it as a true publication. Well written blog posts, articles, commentaries, poems, etc., are valid examples of a writer’s work. If done with portfolio building in mind, blogs can serve as a testimony to a writer’s abilities and professionalism.

Ideas I wrote down, though I don’t know where I found them. (I think they were advertisement for an online course on teaching blogging. But they aren’t there now.)

* Blogs as rough drafts vs. the importance of revising finished prose, and the expectations of the community of readers
This is something my students don’t understand. Because it is on the computer, those who use the computer often, ignore that ours is an academic blog. I need to stress this more.

* Community of blogs as dialogue – the importance of linking, addressing other writers, exposing your writing to a wider audience by becoming part of it

* Blogs as support group, the importance of commenting on other people’s writing and contributing positively to the community

After reading through these and other websites, I wrote:

Blogging is writing, writing in a context which is often decried as too public, but with some simple care, a class blog can be created, made public, and used as a forum for not only writing but reading and response to writing. If we introduce or steer our students into blogging, we may succeed not only in getting students through our courses cheerfully, with improved writing, but also in turning them into lifetime writers.

I suggest that this confluence of writing and internet will help our students in our classrooms, because they are writing for a real audience that is not just the instructor and which is much more likely to hold disparate views, articulate them, and request a response. It can also help some of our students overcome the socioeconomic status they were born in and facilitate their entry into a professional world.