Joe Moxley and Ryan Meehan’s rhetorical query in “Collaboration Literacy Authorship” must be confined to academia, as the author’s note in their disclaimer at the end of their argument, “instructors are largely graduate students or adjuncts, as opposed to instructors or professors with benefits—leading them to focus their attention more on the courses they take as students or their understandable desire to find more secure long-term work, and perhaps less on learning to use new technologies.”
Yet what really goes on in our classrooms and writing programs?
Moxley and Meehan continuation of Stroupe’s important pedagogical debate of the acceptance of technology and digital media in academia is relevant to my experience as a student—off the mark in my experience as a writer—but of great importance to my place in the larger community. Therefore classroom and writing programs must my opinion be addressed as two separated issues.
When push comes to shove, have our classrooms evolved along with our understanding of the collaborative nature of learning and literacy?
My response half way through The City College MFA in Creative Writing Program is a definitive no, noting Digital Literacies as the sole exception for the depth of technological content addressed, Distinguished Professor Jane Marcus, and Virginia Woolf scholar, had assigned individual participation in writing and or correcting Wikipedia entries written about or in context to Woolf. Professor Laura Hinton, American Women’s Experimental Writing, assigned groups of two to write a collaborative analysis of the different elements addressed in Feminist Lyrical Critique. However both professors pedagogy rooted in feminism renders Moxley and Meehan’s argument mute when they speak about students motivated by competition for the holy grail of academe. The grade carries little weight in my personal experience. I have worked just as diligently in Pass/Fail systems as I do in a grade weighted systems, striving to get the most I can from my participation and the professors’ pedagogy. Influenced by my advisers and professor’s feminist practice, grades are a goal—a competition with myself not with other students or writers.
However, I am greatly concerned with graduate students, teach assistants, and adjuncts, blindly teaching humanist ideals of literature and writing that continue to reinforce the privileging to certain texts and certain groups. The study of rhetoric, literary theory and critique could remedy this the circuitous knowledge loop but mention this and for most students it is worst than having all their teeth pulled with anesthesia.
Although I resist the subjugation of the individual to the group—studies show the echo generation almost incapable of solitary occupation, I do agree there must be, as in all human endeavors, a balance. In a country with diverse ethnicity, values, religions, as represented by the population of the United States, standardize tests are a shell games corporations and politicians use to exploit and control by forming on one side small antithetical groups while marginalizing The Other, including President Obama.
Would an analysis of writing classrooms and/or composition textbooks suggest any major changes have occurred in writing, especially collaborative writing or collaborative teaching, over the past twenty years?
This is a bit more complex, as a writer, to answer. The overall pedagogy of the MFA is a MA in Literature with a few workshops added on. Kenneth Burke's parlor metaphor in my experience is for the most part unwelcomed in workshops by fellow participants. Despite Virginia Woolf’s query, ninety years ago, in A Room of One’s Own and numerous essays, “Modern Fiction” being the most definitive, into the 18th and 19th conventions of the novel’s suitability to women writers and by extension cultures once marginalized, and postmodernism, and post-colonialism, a Euro-Western ideological orthodoxy that adheres to Aristotle authorial thesis in Tragedy for arch, plot, and resolution and Henry Fielding later permanently bonded to the novel, continue to be privileged.
Therefore "the wisdom of crowds" invested in The City College MFA writing program would most probably be on the opposite side of the debate of Moxley and Meehan’s query with a fervent commitment to the romantic concept that is “primarily tied to the humanistic tradition of privileging solitary works).” Even I support and defend the writer’s solitude in writing the first draft and revising and point to the collaborative process once the manuscript is presented in workshop or accepted for agent representation and publication when the editor, and editorial groups enter the process. I would argue that the writer aware of an audience, influenced, and in conversation with previous narratives, both print and digital that the idea of “solitary works” is an illusion whereas the idea of a solitary reader/consumer is probable.
As access to the World Wide Web increases, so does the "conversation."
Yes but is anything getting done—a great deal of digital media is generated but most producers of digital media are disembodied spirits shouting into the void. Moxely and Meehan noting the need for “thoughtful reflection on what we need to do next as well as a thoughtful space for exploring future literacy evolutions,” is crucial particularly in their closing argument that dismantles their utopian appeal for a better world through collaboration.
We do understand that solitary writing matters. We acknowledge that in our classrooms we also privilege individual accomplishments, solitary writing, and individual agency. We value the power of the individual to create fundamental change. At times, an individual can be profoundly creative. Although it may be increasingly more difficult to be disconnected from the Internet, surely there are some writers out there now, working in isolation, toiling away in garrets.
we all know groups of people can act illogically, capriciously, and in some instances viciously.
In conclusion, is there a conclusion to this debate? I neither agree nor disagree with Moxley and Meehan’s thesis, as I noted in earlier responses print and digital, books and the internet, compliment each other—financial gains from both are elusive at best, in fact as the World Wide Web increases it is probably more difficult to earn a living from either since a writer must produce and distribute h/her product in two medium—long texts better supported by print and the Web, blog, website, collaboration to promote self and work. Are there enough hours in the day or had I better get a teaching position? Meager as the pay is it is more than most writers earn.
I did click on all the websites and will visit each—when time permits (ha). Time is stingy.
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