Irrelevant

So much to think about this week!  Even though the readings were relatively "light" compared to prior weeks, so many thoughts have surfaced and personal connections have been made.  I was particularly enthralled with Sir Ken Robinson's Ted Talk (yes, I used enthralled on purpose...) and I think he beautifully summed up the current status of education.  Our education system was imagined during the industrial revolution when we were concerned with churning out laborers, not engaging people's talents.  It is a linear system that is extremely hierarchical and its time has passed.  We need to start engaging our students organically and "reconstitute our sense of ability and talent."  Jeremy Rifkin in his book Third Industrial Revolution, which is a visionary tale of a decentralized power grid, also addresses this very issue.  Rifkin claims that in order for our society to address climate change, we need to embrace a new vision of a power grid that is fed from multiple points (solar panels on roof tops, wind turbine in the back yard) rather than coming from a centrally located source (coal-fired plant, etc.) and he believes that our education system plays a key role in making this drastic change.  He believes that our current and future challenges cannot be met with technology and education of the past and that our classrooms need to be collaborative and customized to the student so that the student then has the ability to be truly creative.  We need to ignite a passion in our youth if we are going to address our social problems and clearly from all the posts last week our system is failing to give students that opportunity.  As Robinson said, "Education dislocates very many people from their natural talents" which to me means, our children need to be taught to be critical thinkers and learners and to engage their innate talents - not taught how to take bubble tests. 

So what does this "organic" education system look like?  The 10 million dollar question...We are truly smack-dab in the postmodern age and yet our major systems are stuck in the industrial revolution.  I thought Wysocki in her essay The Multiple Media of Texts was informing on the subject.  She hits upon the idea that our perceptions of what a particular writing ought to be, for example, an academic text, informs the relationship that we will have with the text.  She then questions this assumption and asks, "What kinds of new arguments are possible (for example) if writers of academic pages take more responsibility in choosing the visual presentations of their arguments?  What sorts of relationships can writers establish with readers through different visual presentations?" (p. 125)  So what if academic texts were more visually informing?  Would this generation of disillusioned youth find some value in a paper that was animated, that had movement to the page or was digitized using sound, sight and text?  Is is time for the establishment to address the social circumstances that now face it and move towards engaging our youth in a way that makes sense to them?

Bernhardt in Seeing the Text compares the movement of homogenized, linear, paragraph style rhetoric and that of visual text and states, "And the closer our models come to literary norms, to the norms of the polite, personal, anthologized essay typical of the Eastern literary 'establishment, ' the greater are the demands on the student to produce essays which are subtle in their organizational schemes."  Is this really what a professor is looking for in an essay, the sort of writing that is "enshrined in the handbooks of our trade."  And if so, what is the student gaining by producing a piece that clearly does not reflect the current social paradigm or their innate talents and creativity?  Our texts are changing.  The way we are getting and interfacing with information is changing and yet we seem unable or unwilling to make the shift.  We need to instill a sense of efficacy as Goetz states in his Ted Talk. Our students need to believe that they have the power to make change and we need to engage them, give them the opportunity to act.  Bernhardt sums it up nicely; "Classroom practice which ignores the increasingly visual, localized qualities of information exchange can only become increasingly irrelevant.  Influenced especially by the growth of electronic media, strategies of rhetorical organization will move increasingly toward visual patterns on screens and interpreted through visual as well as verbal syntax."  I guess the audience really does hold all the cards!