01 September 2008

Topic: proposed "study"

Given my conflicted position amidst humanities and social sciences (and their different definitions of what counts as scholarship, etc.), this may be a risky idea, but I'll try it. As I envision the "study" I would do for a dissertation (what would generally exist in a traditional social science endeavor—i.e., the whole "lab write-up" idea of an experiment), it would go something like this: take a "representative" sample of news items, identify the tropes I see being used throughout them, describe the frames those tropes work within/call into being/whathaveyou, discuss the underpinnings of those frames, and how those ideological underpinnings argue for /against certain policies. Come up with the "ergo: media (as currently practiced) incline certain policies to succeed".

The question I've always had is, "Is that enough?" In terms of length, etc., I suspect it is; however, in terms of answering the "So what?", I don't think it is. Basically I feel like I'd be replicating common sense in academic jargon—exactly what I think is why we're so ineffective at actually getting to solutions. I don't think there are too many people (who have enough of a passing interest in the subject that they'd be willing to read through whatever I'd write) that wouldn't be able to come to the same conclusions—and more importantly—haven't already. They won't have dotted all the "i"s and crossed all the "t"s, but there'd be a lot of "duh" going on. Maybe that means that it doesn't represent "new developments in the field" or "original scholarship" or whatever, but I think a heck of a lot of scholarship (in a ton of fields) that I've read has met the same fate, so I don't think I'm in too much danger there. [Unless I'm so fabulously smart that I instinctively operate at the highest levels of several different disciplines—but I doubt that.]

The real question of the "so what" test is, "so what do you do with this knowledge?" Granted, that would be some obligatory last chapter entitled "directions for further research" or some crap,...and maybe that's what it should justifiably be—just leave it at that, get the letters after my name and be done with it. Worry about doing that "further research" after jumping this hurdle rather than trying to make it the high bar to jump on my first run up. But the "crap" feeling I get with that approach is that I'll do all that work to not even get to the point where I think the actual work starts, so if I'm going to spend all this time to do work on a dissertation, and if that whole study points to fulfilling only "the law of duh", then why not start at the next point—given that the media isn't giving us the conversation about education that we need—what conversation should we be having about education (and how can we have it in the media)?

The problem there is that I feel like I'm no longer on safe ground. I feel like at that point it's just me spouting what I think is cool—not backed up by what I could call scholarship, or research or whathaveyou, and I'd instead by simply advocating what I think is right. And I can quote other people who I think are right as well, who have said things that I think are right about what schools should be teaching, and arguably I could point out [from my perspective] why, when they've said it, it hasn't gained traction (in keeping with the whole "we need a new rhetoric" idea of the first "study"). But I'm much less sure of what a "study" like that would look like, or how to do it (especially in a way to pass academic muster).

19 June 2008

Topic: latest thinking

Yeah, yeah...so this act of blogging regularly will inspire me to be more productive just isn't quite working out as I had hoped. That said, let's not cry over spilled milk. I attended the Rhetoric Society of America and an interesting session revisiting Dewey vs. Lippmann (in short, it's the debate about the nature of "the public" in a modern age, where Lippmann argues that the modern world is too complex, and people are too busy to take an active interest in everything they need to know as members of the public; therefore a technocratic elite--in Lippmann's world "objective" journalists--would sift through the information, distill it, and then present it, and the public's job would be to get behind those people who they perceive to be the smartest at handling it VS. Dewey's version of New England town meeting writ large, where even if people can't understand the nuances of the farm bill, they can understand the major issues at stake and engage with others in a community to make good decisions...a sort of lots of mini-publics discussing a number of ideas--not necessarily all they need to know or do--and people would be part of many different publics...a sort of interest group democracy).

And it got me thinking about my "question"...I know it revolves around the confluence of the terms "media" "education" and "public" (and probably some form of "hegemony" or "global economic supremacy" etc. set in contradistinction to "democracy" or some similar concept), but is it best expressed as:
1) what is the role of "the media" (a term I recognize to be problematic, but in popular discourse for a reason; therefore used without estrangement quotes hereafter--i.e., I'm not looking to have that conversation now) in [influencing/ creating/ framing] education policy? [Is a concomitant, "what should it be" implied? necessary? And there we get to the question of how big does the question need to be? How small a slice am I looking to carve out so as to be manageable--since obviously that's a problem--yet still large enough to constitute "a contribution to the field"--and absent a defined field of folks engaged in this debate, how does one determine that? But that's another existential crisis for a different post.] Or is it:
2) what role does [and again, could/should] the media play in creating a public who can advocate for education[al change beneficial to democracy and not corporate hegemony]? Or is it:
3) etc. (a.k.a., to be continued)

And I suppose the issue again here is "is 'the question' supposed to perform a 'rhetorical"'function?" That is to say, is it supposed to be a "rhetorical question", the straight man to set up my punchline, of the answer I already know, and the work from proposal onward to be the marshaling of evidence to drive that point home? Or is it more the role of defining an area I believe worth investigating and the work from the proposal forward is to trace the outlines of what's profitable to talk about in that "field" (however constructed)?

I presume it to be the first (especially since that's more manageable), but I'm more intrigued by doing the work of the second--though perhaps that's presumed to be the preliminary work (that I'm supposed to already have completed) to get me to the first. All that said...I think what's interesting about that formulation/musing about the definitional aspect of the "question" is that it reflects the larger question above. That is to say, what I'm really interested in is how does one construct a public capable of talking about these things intelligently? (i.e., since I can't find more people like me to talk to, how do I grow them...or put less arrogantly--how do I get people to understand me, for it's in that act of dialogue that we come to a shared set of frames/common language/mutual understanding that is also associated with "community" "democracy" "the unforced force of discourse" or whathaveyou.)

So the problem that needs sense made of it, that we need to get smarter about, etc., is (in this iteration)...how do we get people to view the purpose of education (more) as the induction of the young into democratic practice, limited hierarchy, and/or social justice? [I am, of course, presuming here that I don't need to argue that as a value set worth espousing--though obviously it's contestable, otherwise it wouldn't be a condition we would have to work to obtain--and that points out that I don't think that it's necessary to show that we need more of it. Is that an unreasonable assumption? Isn't that the challenge of being an academic? One has to (be ready to) question every assumption?]

So the answer I would pose would be to say "through presentations of education (and educational policy issues) in the media". Why?:
1) Current depictions are exceedingly focused on hierarchy (either as meritocracy, or as [unintentional? does it matter?] neoliberal worldview)
2) most people's interaction with education [policy] comes through the media (warranted assertion? acceptable as axiomatic? I'd say yes.)
2b) I'd say this about that point: people have limited knowledge of what actually goes on in schools...their conceptions are informed by their experience as students (however long ago that was), and descriptions of it in the media (which fall into two major types [is it even a question of major vs. minor? Are there any "minor" types?]: narratives about the heroic teacher struggling against the odds (one of which is always an uncaring bureaucracy) to touch the hearts of h/er students, who repay h/er efforts with learning and love, and the other type--the broadside against the institution in general as bloated, uncaring, overly afraid of lawsuits [and consequently irrational], that churns out students unprepared for anything.) [Anybody wanna argue with that?]
3) these depictions make it easy to withdraw support from schools because they're presented as fundamentally broken (because all depictions show systemic failures--all successes come in spite of the system, rather than because of it--even depictions of successful interventions (e.g., some curricular innovation or some new intervention program tried within a given school)--present it as the work of dedicated teachers, parents, or staff members, who fought to make it happen, and are worried that it won't continue to receive funding, etc. In other words, even though it's pitched as an attempt to highlight systemic interventions, the fear that the intervention won't be able to get up to scale undercuts the idea that any systemic change can work.

02 April 2008

Topic: Research Design

In a nutshell, I want my dissertation to be about the following:
The story I want to tell is about how the media gets it wrong on education. And by, "how they get it wrong," I mean how they tell the wrong stories about education. This entails 1) detailing what stories they're telling, 2) explaining where those stories are coming from [is this particularly necessary to explain why they don't work?], 3) explaining why those stories don't work, and 4) giving examples that might "get it right".

So now, let's break that down: Two big questions arise, but which do I address first?
1) How do I do that? (i.e., method)
2) What does this look like in a more narrowed down way (i.e., forming a question).

Let's start with 2 (even though I've spent the semester reading about #1). The main story (that I see) they're getting wrong is parroting "all children can learn" uncritically. We're starting to see it crack as NCLB is coming up for reauthorization and one of the main issues states are starting to confront is that there's no way that they'll hit 100% by 2014, and all those states that started with low annual pass rates (hoping that reauthorization would change the goals) are realizing that now is the time because their curve is really trending up now. The other pressures are: the need to add science as well as English and math, and the fact that we're now seeing a number of schools that are coming up for "restructuring" and no confidence that the most drastic measure for failing schools under NCLB will be any more effective than anything tried before. So the pressure on that narrative is starting to show, so we're at a point where a new narrative may emerge.

But I'm not seeing that emerge...willingly, I should say. The storyline that's emerging is that states are trying to figure out how to get to 100%, and that's difficult. On one hand, it's tailor-made for the news--as far as education stories go--it's got conflict (schools vs. whatever various struggles the article cares to detail that schools face to get to 100%), drama (in the sense of a timeframe schools are working against), in a story that is a tight package (look at the test scores--how close are we?).

04 February 2008

Meta: Other methodological inspirations

Among other folks who are doing work similar to the ideas I'm thinking about are Sandra Stein's (2004) The culture of education policy (Teachers College Press: New York). Stein looks at how discussions of Title I in its various (re-)authorizations define the children who are supposed to receive the benefits of their policies as deficient, and how those definitions create unintended consequences (e.g., the perverse incentive to continue to define children in these terms to continue to receive money), either creating new problems or proving the policies inadequate to solving the problem (as its posed through that definition).

I have to say that I fully agree with what she's doing in this work; the major difference between what she's doing and how I envision my work is that
she looks at the language of the policymakers, and then shows how (the perverse consequences of) those constructs are embodied in the ways practicioners talk about (and subsequently) implement that policy. While I think that's important, I don't think practioners are following the actual words of policymakers particularly closely; I think media play an important mediating (pardon the pun) role in communicating the constructs of policymakers to practioners (and communicating the "array of possible choices" to policymakers, and in so doing, setting the parameters of the debate), and therefore pose an important point of/for intervention.

24 January 2008

Meta: possible method?

I just read Marlia Banning's "Truth floats: Reflexivity in the shifting public and epistemological terrain" Rhetoric Society Quarterly (35) 3, Summer 2005. pp. 75-99. I'm not thrilled with the article; it seems to claim that self-awareness about the creation of texts erodes publics' confidence in texts. It seems to cling a little too tightly to the myth of objective reporting. For example, she says: "As shifts in information increasingly obscure the purpose, source, and status of any given communication, and reflexive representations highlight the constructed nature of any account, however, the information and common reference world so central to the possibilities of conversation in public life is diminishing" (p. 92). I would argue instead of "obscuring" communication, they're simply upending our previous ways of understanding communication. I would also argue that the "common reference world" was always a convenient fiction; recognizing that not every public was the object of address in the past forces us to realize the need to (and difficulties of ) address(ing) them now.

I'd argue that it doesn't erode publics' confidence, so much as educate publics to the fact that objectivity is a myth to be resisted and interrogated. It educates publics to be smarter about the information they're consuming. And I don't feel the "natural risks" section is particularly convincing (i.e., there's nothing particularly enlightening about 'natural risks' than about any other type of story--it seems that she's generalizing 'natural risks' as a way to highlight the controversy over the science behind global warming--but without ever saying that. While it might serve as a relevant example, one could also point to the administration's parsing of the definition of "torture" as another example where the arguments over definition define the debate and divide the public).

I have to say that I do love the method she uses: "My method catalogues events across media and genres. As Michael McGee has delineated, any 'apparently finished discourse is in fact a dense reconstruction of all the bits of other discourses from which it is made.' ('Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture' 279). Thus one of the primary jobs for rhetoricians in a fragmented cultural context, is 'inventing a text suitable for criticism' (288). I watched, read, or listened to public news just as anyone of my socioeconomic status and rhetorical training might do and then actively selected and catalogued the 'scraps and pieces of evidence' that I present here (279). That I catalog events in this manner is significant; it is this kind of cataloguing that eventually produces the density and compression of facts in daily living that form the information necessary for deliberation of public affairs. My methodology in this article--aside from my training and particular expertise--is a rhetoric of the everyday. It is a public method available to all, though circumscribed by the degree to which various publics are aware of the representation practices of the media and the state, and the kind of cataloging that is involved in producing the information that they use in their deliberation on public matters" (p. 79).

However, does the method of "I collected a bunch of stories I thought were relevant" have sufficient legitimacy? Is there a richer tradition that this is drawing on that can build enough to make a dissertation from? Or is it legitimate enough to go with based on just this article's reading of an article?

04 January 2008

Tangent: politics, narrative, and statistics

I've previously talked about how the most important thing to winning an argument is not having the facts on your side, but having a compelling narrative that makes "the facts" make sense to the audience. We seem to be seeing that develop even more in national politics of late:
From Salon.com:
"It is striking how Obama's rhetoric differs from standard political oratory by being a statistic-free zone. In the closing days in Iowa, Obama might talk for 40 minutes in a tiny town like Perry while citing only one or two numbers. In contrast, Clinton on the stump is a human pocket calculator, constantly telling voters how much purchasing power they have lost under Bush (about $1,000) and how many jobs were created under Bill Clinton (lots!). Even Edwards spices his talks with a burst of numbers about the extent of poverty in America." (Shapiro, W. Barack Obama's breakthrough victory. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/01/04/iowa_dems/)

Dan Schorr (Schorr, D. The politics of truth and celebrity. All Things Considered, Jan. 2, 2008. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17790148) connects this phenomenon to "celebrity worship"; which, though I think it does provide some insight, unduly temporizes the phenomenon with a kind of presentism that probably wouldn't hold up under scrutiny. (i.e., while the trope that "America is celebrity obsessed, to the point of neglecting important issues" is everywhere today, I think the phenomenon of being more taken with the narrative than the data predates our collective obsession with Britney.)

Tangent: intellectual detritus

1) Citizenship rhetoric & education (continued): As previously discussed, schools are about creating the next batch of citizens; thinking about that in light of other previous thoughts about immigration, made me start to play the analogy out (something I do lots of; hence my interest in "reframings" and other ways to further inform the debate through tilting it on its side)...does this then make home schooling the equivalent reaction of the xenophobe? (We can't control the larger world, and it's all going to ruin, so we have to "seal the borders" and only deal with taking care of our own.) Is home schooling essentially the paleo-con position? If that's true, is public schooling essentially a neo-con construction? I suppose it could be, or it could be a liberal construction (if education is conceived as creating a new collaborative culture rather than imperially imposing culture upon the next generation--a la the neocons).

2) The rhetoric of NAR takes on media consolidation: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre [media environment] that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in [media diversity] made in the wake of the [the advent of public broadcasting in the US]. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral [intellectual] disarmament." Does saying it that way make my thesis more compelling?

3) Motivation & GEC: In my day job as a marketer, I got a copy of Motivation Strategies, a trade publication about using promotional items to motivate sales teams, etc. I found this interesting:

Including luxury brands in an incentive program can be a great way to dress it up and give participants something to stretch for--believing that if they just work a little harder they might have a shot at earning that high-quality, luxury item. But incentive end-users should also make sure the luxury item fits the demographics and profile of participants.
But don't let your luxury item become the be-all and end-all of your program, says Dana Slockbower, Director of Marketing for Rymax. 'You need to have quality branded products at price points for everyone,' she says. 'Some people will be driven by that aspirational luxury item they can work towards, but others need to feel they can actually achieve their goals and get something of value in return.'
It becomes demotivating, in fact, 'to offer rewards that cannot be reached,' says Norma Jean Knollenberg of Top Brands, 'regardless of the brand or the perceived luxury value of the brand.'
("Living in the Lap of Luxury (Brands)", Motivation Strategies, Vol. 11, Issue 4, Fall 2007. p. 22)

So why is this interesting? Not because it's particularly insightful--if one remembers the chapter from high school psychology class, one can probably resurrect that page about the rats in the cage with the electrified floor and learned helplessness. What's interesting is that it's coming from what can only be called "the heart of the GEC beast"--capitalism at its finest, where competition is celebrated, and good citizenship is a PR strategy, not a responsibility (previous issues have talked about how companies perceived as "green" are rising in popularity without any need to address the issue of being green vs. being perceived as green).
Yet even here, there's a recognition that "offering rewards that cannot be reached" can be demotivating. Yet the quintessence of the GEC paradigm is the understanding that education serves the purpose of increasing one's success in the marketplace. It has no "backup plan", no "quality branded products at price points for everyone" for someone who looks around h/erself and doesn't see people succeeding in the marketplace; it has nothing to say to someone who recognizes that h/er job opportunities are limited by factors that have little to do with education. It has only that dream to sell; anyone who doesn't believe is accused of not dreaming hard enough. There is no recognition (in the education policies proposed in the GEC paradigm) that there needs to be a reason to attend school that helps students "feel they can actually achieve their goals and get something of value in return."

And nevermind the idea of being first in the world in all subjects and all elements of the global economy is to offer "rewards that cannot be reached", no matter how "luxury" such an idea might seem. From reading articles like this, it seems apparent that even the business community (which educationists are supposed to be falling over themselves to emulate) recognizes that not everyone is the top salesperson; motivation strategies exist to help improve the overall efforts and effects of the sales staff, but not everyone can (or wants to) "achieve at world-class levels". Yet, to point out such a fact in education policy is complete heresy--seen as proof that one recognizes others as categorically inferior, rather than proof that one recognizes the belief that "everyone wants a Rolex" is a categorically inferior belief.