Logic Boxes and Enabling Pedagogy for Students with Autism

Sirc advocates the logic box as something that increases the interactivity of a text, enabling students, ARTISTS!, to become aware of texts' materiality. Logic boxes are an interesting idea, not in a patronizing way, things that are a different representation of an age old idea: put things, literally, things, in a square-ish space. It's composition in another form and method, as Sirc points out (122-123): In traditional composition, words (things) are arranged in a meaningful way (sentences, paragraphs) within a limiting space (margins, the rectangular form of paper, etc.). Logic boxes are spaces with borders(are they necessarily boxes? could there be an invisible box?), performing the same function as paper for an essay, that contain things (more than words) arranged in meaningful ways. That last part, arrangement, is the element most liberated in the genre of logic box. Loosely defined, a logic box is a defined three dimensional space in which an author/artist constructs meaning through various objects, often found objects.

Last fall, I took Dr. Mara's class on the rhetoric of creativity. One set of assignments provided creative options, such as a taking a photograph or writing on 750words.com for 14 days...or make a box logic, um, box. The latter befuddled and intrigued me..."what the hell do I do with a box?' I shoveled the idea into my mental furnace but it never resurfaced. And, to be honest, after reading more about logic boxes I may understand the concept more but, for myself, I do not think they are the least bit interesting. However, logic boxes sound uniquely like enabling composition to me.

Sirc's goal, to “journey away from the linear norm of essayist prose” fits well within an inclusive, enabling pedagogy, particularly in relation to autistic students. Personal experience and scholarship suggest that many autistic people have nonlinear cognitive and writing styles, such as Temple Grandin. Anne Jurecic notes in her article “Neurodiversity,” that Grandin's writing does not consider audience because of its loosely connected, tangential structure (430-431). Comparing Grandin's writing structure to Jurecic's student Gregory's writing, this autistic structure, Jurecic suggests, is rooted in autistic students' neurological wiring, brain structures that preclude those students' ability to emulate the academic writing conventions of linear argument, coherence, and focus (429). Jurecic goes on to rally for composition teachers "expand our sense of the depth and reach of difference--not so that we can exclude, but so that we can teach" (439). She is stuck in between a rock and a hard place, trying to enable autistic students to find their own way through the labyrinthine mess of exclusionary neurotypical (neurotypicals are to people with autism what muggles are to wizards and witches) writing conventions, conventions, she implies, that may be rooted in neurotypical neurology (434).

Sirc's logic boxes work for neurotypical students. These boxes reduce the analytic loci of composition, decentering it in favor of something expressive (Sirc 124). Analysis is something many college students with autism spectrum disorders excel at--it's the structure, according to Jurecic, that confounds them. Fortunately, logic boxes allow for flexibility in process and design: citing Katherine Stiles, Sirc explains "What is it that writers do, exactly, if not 'point to things in the world and negotiate their meanings through symbolic productions?" (Sirc 125). He adds that "the new classroom activities to refine these elements let students use what they really care about and love (or hate) as the new subject matter in their work" (Ibid). Logic boxes liberate not only in that they allow for diverse forms of structure, focus, coherence, and meaning-making but also because that allows for student creators to use "what they love." One of the two biggest barriers to success in assignments, not just writing assignments but any kind of assignment, for students with autism is the motivational factor. This framework gives a student with autism the opportunity to work with her special interest, allowing her to find her own voice through the annotating and searching. 

"Toward New Media Texts" (Selfe)

Cynthia Selfe discusses visual literacy and possible assignments to teach visual literacy in the chapter “Toward New Media Texts.”  Selfe points out how many teachers of composition have steered clear of teaching visual literacy (and other literacies involved in new media) because they do not feel qualified to teach about them.  Some teachers have introduced visual literacy in their classrooms but have done so in such a way that presents visual texts as subordinate to alphabetic texts.  According to Selfe, by expanding composition studies to include visual literacy, “we may not only learn to pay more serious attention to the ways in which students are now ordering and making sense of the world through production and consumption of visual images, but we may also extend the usefulness of composition studies in a changing world” (72).  Indeed, the world is changing and relying more fully on new media in order to convey messages.  Alphabetic texts will not disappear anytime soon, but visual texts are becoming more important.  

One of the sample assignments Selfe introduces is “Text Re-Design and Re-vision.”  Basically, the assignment is to take an alphabetic text and rethink it to put it on a website.  This sample assignment is most similar to the video commentary assignment that is part of the “inherited” English 120 class.  The video commentary assignment, for anybody who does not know, requires students to get in groups, take one commentary that one group member already wrote, and remix it into a “music video” format.  Most of the students in my class last semester made amazing video commentaries and were much more familiar with the technology than I was.  I liked the assignment because the students liked it-- I think they liked working in groups and they liked making a video.  However, it was almost unanimously, according to my students, the easiest assignment we did all semester.  I also felt a little silly going over elements of PowerPoint with my students.  I could feel them not paying attention.  

I am looking for ways to make the video commentary assignment more interesting and challenging.  However, when I think of doing something like requiring that every video commentary have one embedded video or something of the sort, I run into the problem that I do not know how to do such a thing.  When I think about teaching iMovie as the basic program to use, I am aware that many students do not have iMovie (and, again, I do not know how to use it).  It also would feel like “I’m making this an assignment requirement because I am trying to make it sound more challenging, but really I’m just a little insecure teaching new media and am trying not to be.”  In short, doing any of these things would be really inauthentic.  

I like the idea of remixing an assignment that is already an alphabetic text.  The video commentary, however,  seems to involve lessons that feel like a waste of time.  Likewise, Selfe’s “Text Re-Design and Re-vision” assignment might involve lesson plans that feel like wasted time.  

But I do know I am being pessimistic.  

Expanding "Text" (Selfe "Students Who Teach Us")

In “Students Who Teach Us,” Cynthia L. Selfe issues a challenge to English teachers to expand their idea of composition so that it includes the new communication methods that students are using (54).  I strongly agree that print literacy is no longer the dominant form of communication, and even electronic forms that resemble print documents are becoming less important.  Maybe our society just needs to take some Ritalin, but I think it goes beyond failure to focus on words.  We have been exposed to communicating through images, animations, sounds, and interactions, and now text doesn’t seem to convey as much meaning as it used to.

By “text,” I am referring to alphabetical language, but Selfe seems to be using a different definition when she talks about “new media texts” (49).  She doesn’t really provide a definition of text in this article, so I’m not sure quite how expansive she intends the term to be.  Perhaps she doesn’t want to limit the term by providing a definition, since Selfe doesn’t know what new forms will appear in the near future that will need to be included under “text.”  For my writing, I would like to at least include those communication tools that involve sound, animation, and interactivity under the heading “text.”  If I can at least expand the term text that far, then I can relate this article to a paper I wrote last semester on webcomics, anime music videos (AMVs), and indie games.

Webcomics, AMVs, and indie games are relatively new creative forms that are dependent on technology and the Internet.  They interest me because, although they use very different means of communication, they attract similar audiences and seem to be fulfilling similar roles.  Through Selfe’s article, I can view these three creative forms as a new type of literacy.  Like David Damon, people who create these forms may not be fluent in print literacy, but they are still capable of communicating, expressing, and teaching through alternative means.  Furthermore, these methods of communication are more relevant to many peoples’ lives than print literacy is.

As a composition instructor, I don’t quite know what to make of this information.  While a unit on AMVs would be fun, our students are probably still too indoctrinated into print culture to embrace such a project.  Also, I don’t think we could possibly teach them enough skills to make them effective in communicating in a fraction of the new types of literacy that are emerging.  However, I still like the idea of analyzing new forms that have emerged through which people express themselves so that we can continually expand our notion of text and composing.

Wysocki

Pointing out the divide in new media studies between the study of how to design and compose individual texts (through graphic design maxims) and the study of the broad effects of media structures, Wysocki argues that composition studies can fill the gap between the two by focusing on the material and social conditions of the production and consumption of all texts, both textual, visual, and digital.

She has five major claims:

1. compositionists have the unique pedagogical expertise to teach students how to think critically about their design and composition choices when writing a text because we already highlight the situated nature of writing.
2. We need to think about the specific material circumstances and choices of the texts we produce, consume, and circulate because no technology is a neutral carrier; our texts contain, in their design and construction, our attitudes, beliefs, and values, both individually and as a society.
3. New media texts are any texts, digital or not, whose composer thought deliberately about the range of material design choices they had and who, in their design, highlight the materiality of the text.
4. We need, as teachers, to move beyond analysis of new media texts and ask our students to craft and produce them in our classrooms, thinking of new media texts not as objects but rather as material practices.
5. We also need to adopt a generous spirit in our reading, knowing that composing these new media texts requires experimentation, patience, and exploration, and in order to appreciate these efforts, we need to realize that texts need not look identical to what we’re accustomed to in order to be useful, that what we might deem mistakes should be thought of in terms of choices.

Significantly, Wysocki defines “New media” as “texts where we keep their materiality visible, both as we work to make them and as we hold them before us.”

 It seems ironic on first reading that Wysocki’s major move in securing the potential of this moment is to ask us to become more conscious of our materials when the zeitgeist behind all things digital seems to be Cartesian—seems, in fact, to be actively hostile toward a consciousness of materiality. This seeming irony, however, is exactly why Wysocki’s five openings are so important. By moving against the anti-historical philosophy of the new technology of writing—and yet embracing the technology itself—Wysocki discovers an opening for a pedagogy wherein students can gain productive access to a larger community [Wysocki explicitly passes on elaborating the well established boons of teaching digital communications technology] while still understanding the historical forces that have had a part in the production of their voices. To borrow from the reasoning of Wysocki’s fourth opening, this is why we as teachers of writing must be active in the production of new media texts: if we can participate in this technological shift in a way that offers radically growth in terms of what new media texts mean, then when the next revolution comes around, perhaps it will come not from an ahistorical Cartesianism, but rather from a place informed by our own materialities and not hostile toward a self-reflexive, self-critical expression of these materialities.

Class activity wordle for our "Borderlands" class. Word.

Appalachians, Sponsors, and Literacy: Webb-Sunderhaus

Sara Webb-Sunderhaus’s research on sponsors, which according to Deborah Brandt are “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, and model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold, literacy…” (p. 1601) involved students in English Composition courses at two open-admission universities in Central Appalachia. In the two summer classes she used to gather data, one had 18 students and the other 14 students. The breadth of research instruments she used to gather data is intense, she included: participant observations, transcripts of individual cases, a brief demographic survey, formal interviews, and an extended survey based on her interview script (p. 1602). She discusses several different sponsors that the students had. They range from large institutions such as religion to immediate family members. She found that, “Some relatives emerge as both sponsors and inhibitors…” (p. 1600).

Narratives involving Appalachian people, according to the author, are split into two camps, one displaying and telling of the redneck/hillbilly/white trash culture and the sexual deviance and ignorance they contain. The other camp is a picturesque vision of Appalachian people and their devotion to family. Loyal Jones states, “Mountain people usually feel an obligation to family members and are more truly themselves when within the family circle” (p.1602). Through her research Webb-Sunderhaus found that this notion of family was a central point to sponsorship or being an inhibitor of literacy, sometimes both within the same person. Although there are many different ways to promote or inhibit literacy that Webb-Sunderhaus discusses in her findings (religion and spiritual development, socioeconomic status (particularly in material goods such as food and shelter) and advice on how to approach instructors and areas of study) the one I would like to focus on is gender.

There were two important areas of gender that were discussed, fathers encouraging their kids to go to school and women being held back because of strict gender roles. It is interesting to note that when we talk about men encouraging their kids to go on to college, this is seen as a positive  (and rare) happening, whereas when we are talking about women (specifically women with children) going to school it is seen as negative. Both of these scenarios tend to happen because of the strict gender roles in Appalachian society that are typically spurred by religious institutions (p. 1614). In the case of Michelle’s literacy story with her father showed her by doing, meaning he kept his college textbooks, subscribed to science periodicals and openly discussed career and the schooling needed in order to have a career in health and science. Nurturing of children is often a domain left to mothers and is typically bound to only mothers and therefore fathers are often overlooked in studies of literacy and children (p. 1608).  However, Brandt  writes, “[t]he historically privileged position that men have occupied in education and employment made fathers in many households the conduits of specialized skills and materials that could be of interest and use to other family members” (p. 1608). This means that many fathers hold power in discussing literacy and promoting it within their family. They are able to encourage and show the benefits of education just be being who they are.

Pamela and Julie’s literacy stories both have to do with how they struggle/d to stay in school while dealing with difficult family issues and decisions (pregnancy and divorce). In fact, both ended up leaving school for a period of time and we do not find out if they end up re-enrolling. One thing that I found fascinating was that both of these women dealt with a gender-role reversal of being the breadwinner of their families. With the flux of this specific strict societal gender role we see it as detrimental to their being able to stay in school as both went through divorces and then had to (were pressured to by family and partners) to return home to work and take care of their kids. This is not something that is specifically dedicated to literacy studies. We often find successful women politicians who are asked “who is taking care of the kids?” which is something most (if any) male politicians are asked. Although it is difficult for many to perceive and do, it would be helpful for Appalachian communities (specifically  for women) to break down the walls of strict gender roles. Not only would it create a better environment for women to go and stay in school, but it will relieve the pressure of men being the sole-breadwinners. It would also help fathers feel more comfortable taking a nurturing role in their children’s education and would not inhibit women from desiring to be successful in arenas outside of mothering. I think this is a win-win situation. What do you think?

Jarratt

Evoking Lunsford and Ede, Jarratt claims that the goal of rhetoric is to create an expanding, dynamic sense of ethos between author and audience (1390). At first, I didn’t understand this, but considering Kinneavy who emphasizes writing’s primary role as the articulation of the individual, Jarratt, Ede, and Lunsford begin to make more sense. What Jarratt is analyzing are the metaphoric and metonymic ways in which Spivak, Minh-ha, and Menchú Tum disrupt “first world” constructions of postcolonial female identities; each person whose work Jarratt analyzes does so by deconstruction.

Remembering structuralism from the Critical Theory class I took two years ago, structuralism looks at the relationship between constituents of a whole—how the individual elements of a text relate to the construction of the whole. Thus the accompanying assumption of structuralism is that the relationship between the constituents and the whole, as well as a sense of the whole, hinges on some sort of stable center. In other words, in order to have a notion of the whole, we have to have some central meaning associated to it, like a theme in literature. Post-structuralism/deconstruction on the other hand, de-stabilizes a sense of the whole, undoing the notion of centrality (Derrida called this “de-centering”). In deconstruction, therefore, the notion of one whole is abandoned. This paved the way for what amounts to cognitive dissonance in textual interpretation: feminist, queer, postcolonial, postmodern, historicist, and race lenses can all be applied to a text with equal validity.  

Jarratt’s subjects, each in her own way, disrupts the identity thrown over them by people who have materially different realities—people who lack the authority to do so, in other words. Metaphor and metonymy are the specific things Jarratt examines. Spivak, for example, creates reactive personae that contradict white, first world metaphors of Indian women(1386); Minh-ha replaces the context by which first world authors construct metonymy by redefining the relationship between the self and the collective (1389-90); and Menchú Tum—she’s another matter entirely.

Rather than leading the reader to assume that deconstruction and distancing one’s identity or one’s group’s identity from the audience is the modus operandi of feminists reacting to first world constructions of their identity, Menchú Tum actually seeks to close the gap between audience and author (1394). Jarratt wants to establish frameworks for subjectivity that do not so easily divorce themselves from context (1395). It is this context that gives rise to the individual dynamic, one that is too often placed out of that context or replaced altogether. Here, Jarratt moves to a pithy statement about advocacy: “And by enabling our students to write multiple versions of themselves informed by a knowledge of rhetoric in its political and figurative functions, we may give them access to their own experiences of conjunction and disjunction” (1396). Further, she responds implicitly to Bartholomae, who assumes that all students are trying to gain entrance into academic discourse communities: postcolonial feminist restructurings “might help us as we read student writing about the self to discover how students resist or refigure ethos and audience to characterize their own relations to the academy” (1391). If the way we characterize our identities through writing (and other rhetorical activities) is my establishing ourselves as similar and different to established identities, and by substituting the unknown with the known, then Jarratt’s considerations of that ever-dynamic process influence how we read the writing of students with disabilities as well as disability involves as much the ablist unauthorized metaphoric and metonymic construction of identity as first world [white male] constructions of postcolonial woman identity.