Kairotic Design: Building Flexible Networks for Online Composition
Party Time at Burke's Place (Ryan)
As rhetoricians we often talk about Kenneth Burke and his parlor—how rhetoric is like a cocktail party with all these people milling about and we have to listen before jumping into a conversation. It's a common, helpful, and perhaps overused illustration of the rhetorical situation. As much as I still rely on Burke's metaphor to introduce students to the idea of rhetoric as conversation, I've found the focus in the metaphor to be limited. As teachers we tend to talk about the listening and conversational aspects; we don't really talk about the milling around part—the roving from group to group. We don't talk about the how, why, and where of the cliques that form during the party. In short, we neglect showing Burke's parlor as a more nuanced and contextualized space to be navigated and negotiated.
Chances are that guests at the conventional Burkean soiree aren't going to move the furniture. Instead the guests will rely on their host's careful (or not so careful) construction of the parlor. Are the drinks centrally located to entice people to move around? Is the host circulating and introducing people? Where are the obstacles and impediments to conversation?
We don't often talk about anything besides the talking. We talk about the guests and what they talk about. Sure, we want to teach students how to enter the conversation, but rarely do we look at how the conversation comes to be spoken in context. It figures—as teachers, we are often assigned a classroom and we show up to host the party. The layout is fairly predictable: A teacher station with a whiteboard, some desks or computer tables. We show up to this parlor with the mission to get the party started.
And here it occurs to me that there's a reason that Burke chose a metaphor of a parlor over a classroom to explain the nature of rhetoric. It's because classrooms make for crappy party locations. More importantly for us as teachers, classrooms as they are laid out make for bad conversation.
Think of the traditional classroom. Chances are you thought of something that looked like the classroom shown in figure 7.8.
Figure 7.8. Traditional Miami classroom
Unfortunately, the traditional classroom is also familiar to students. And students know how to act in this context because they've grown up doing it. They come in, find a desk, take notes, raise their hands to talk or ask to move around. Most notably in the traditional classroom, students stay quiet. Many classes comprised mainly of first-year students are filled with long silences because the classrooms with which they have become encultured are less participatory—or the participation is controlled by a small number of eager students. Moreover, those classroom spaces are static and closed. They're not spaces to be navigated or rearranged.
Traditional classroom structures lend themselves to a teacher-centered learning environment. If there is a podium or teacher station, a whiteboard, and a video screen at the "front" of the classroom, a teacher trying to enact a student-centered pedagogy has to try extra hard to subvert the dynamic already physically set in place. Teachers utilize group work and leverage small-group discussion against whole-class discussion—an effort only slightly better than the teacher-centered classroom.
As our team for online teaching began to meet, I quickly realized that we were not just trying to host a party in someone else's classroom; we were designing our own classrooms from the activities to the desks (if we wanted desks, that is). The discussions we had as classroom designers in the weeks leading up to the launch of the online English 111 course led to critical insights into how nonphysical spaces function. I could design the best party space ever. Then I had a second realization: My ideal parlor party is perhaps a whole lot different from everyone else. The online course couldn’t just be an invitation to attend a party, it needed to be an opportunity to plan a party. I decided students should help shape the space in the same way guests in a parlor sort themselves into groups.
Because students were effectively helping to shape the online class space through their participation, I wanted to emphasize conversations about what it means to learn and interact in an online community. In a way, I hoped to replicate the process of designing spaces that informed how I began to design the class space. I wanted students in the online section I taught to have the same opportunity to interrogate their environment and their role as students and codesigners of the space. On the most basic levels, codesigning happened when they first designed and customized their blog sites. At the start of the course, several students needed clarification during our Google Hangouts sessions about what I was looking for—a notion that smacks of traditional classroom practice and structure. My reply would be that I wanted to learn what they already knew about online communities; I wanted to see how they interact online. Making their process explicit enough for them to teach me is, of course, a revelatory act where they begin to see their agency and begin to question their actions in online communities.
Conceptualizing the online course is where the interrogation of space begins. As instructors, we had to deal with the larger issues of what sort of space we were setting out to create. Would our classrooms be sites of delivery that reflect the banking model of education? Would we have a more open-access course that built knowledge from the community like a wiki? The sort of class space we created would set the tone for the entire course—not to mention that such spaces would also define participation, hierarchy, process, and writing, among many other aspects of the course. From the start, we viewed the spaces we selected and created as loaded with rhetorical and pedagogical implications. It only seemed fair to invite the students into the planning process.
As a team, my fellow teachers and mentors and I began meeting on a regular basis a couple of months before the launch date of the class. These meetings became essential to the formation of my course. We discussed the ways that the classroom could be more active; we figured out how to do more engaging lectures; we shared ideas for online pedagogy. In these few weeks we all learned about new digital classroom interfaces and developed policies specific to the online class. The tools we developed—video lectures, blog prompts, inquiry assignments—laid the groundwork, we hoped, for the class to be less about the teacher and more networked.
As part of my commitment to student-centered pedagogy, I decided I wanted the online course itself—its formation and manifestation and continual growth as an online community—to be the site of inquiry for English 111. Hence the theme of my section became " Composition and Rhetoric in Online Communities." The basic thought behind this concept was that if I had learned this much about the rhetoric of the digital classroom in preparing to teach the course, then students could also benefit from a similar sort of introspection about their membership in various online communities.
This course was something new to everybody; we had a large number of first-year students taking a first-ever online course at a school that was new to them. I felt that the pressures of learning a new system as well as the materials presented in that system might overwhelm students. I began to wonder if analyzing the design of online learning spaces could be a part of the class itself. The basic idea was to examine the class space as a digital environment to help students gain a better understanding of how the class would work and how their role in the class was defined by the tools we used. As the students applied what they know of social networks to the class, the better they understood how the class functions. Just as we, as instructors, did not start without a concept of scaffolding, students would most likely not come to the class without knowledge of the digital sphere.
In setting up the class I took a chance and thought if students in the digital classroom could see the space as an online community in the vein of a social network, they would be more apt to participate and actively engage in it, especially because the class asked how we define community in the digital age. The logic here is that a student taking an online course would already be familiar and active in other online communities, such as Facebook. (Another neglected aside to Burke's parlor metaphor is that people who go to parties in parlors are probably familiar with parlor parties.)
Demonstrating the digital sphere as a rhetorical space begins with the choice of online community. I wanted to use an already-established social network—something we could build a network within, but I did not act as sole architect of. Students could then transfer the modes of communication from the social network to the class space, using the existing online community as an inventive heuristic. Most importantly, I wanted to give students the agency to choose their own online writing tools and spaces, rather than conforming to my predilections. Within the class, students could move from blog site to blog site, finding the conversations that interested them. And like many parties, the center of discussion did seem to coalesce and move from day to day.
For the rhetorical analysis inquiry, I asked students to home in on an online community and analyze it, considering what values were being promoted, how it targeted particular demographics, what rhetorical moves it made to form a certain type of ethos. Specifically, I asked them to focus on the barriers within the communities, the forms of communication in the community, the role of people's online and real-world personas, as well as the greater context for the community. They had to learn the lingo of a community and what arguments carried weight—what we academics call "discourse conventions" and "appeals" in our social circles.
In prefacing the rhetorical analysis inquiry, I made it clear that the community they selected would be the topic for their next two inquires. I also instituted a rule that pushed them to look beyond the usual suspects in the online world—effectively outlawing Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. This constraint, I should note, yielded some really nuanced ideas of online communities. Students explored their participation in 1980s music forums, groupthink in Groupon, identity in World of Warcraft, truth in advertising in customer comments on retail web sites—some unusual yet familiar sites of inquiry. In exploring these spaces, students began to see their membership in these online communities as having impact. Whether it was rating a product on Amazon or participating in a debate about power ballads, students began to see their presence and participation in these virtual spaces as shaping the space itself.
The public argument inquiry asked students to research more thoroughly how people go about crafting arguments in their online community. Students had to engage in the web site itself—looking at comments and user interactions. They also had to go "outside" of the web site—reading articles that spoke specifically about their site or type of site—to see what arguments were being made and how they were being argued. The end result of this inquiry was an argumentative essay that became the basis for the next inquiry.
The remediation inquiry then asked students to participate in their online communities with the purpose of driving traffic to their blog page, where they posted a redesigned version of their argument for inquiry 3. They needed to record their interactions using screen capture technology and describe in their reflection how they attempted to drive traffic to their blog site. To borrow the term from Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss (2009), students were examining "rhetorical velocity" or "the strategic theorizing for how a text might be recomposed (and why it might be recomposed) by third parties, and how this recomposing may be useful or not to the short- or long-term rhetorical objectives of the rhetorician." The focus on rhetorical velocity for English 111 students (both in traditional and inonline sections) turned the discussion of modality into a discussion of audience, genre, and delivery. For the online student, rhetorical velocity folded in the concept of community because communities form through the delivery and circulation of web-based materials. For the online students, this meant becoming active on the blog sites they had been studying. They participated in forums and used Twitter and Disqus to engage their communities with the ultimate goal of redirecting people to their remediated blogsite. Instead of isolating one conversation from another, students were able to start seeing online interactions as kairotic and interactive. They developed agency to navigate the conversation from one clique to the next.
We could take the assignment sequence I just described and plug it into a traditional English 111 class. The results would meet outcomes. But this assignment sequence, when posed in the digital sphere, went a step further and asked students to look at how we interacted as a class and how our conversations formed. In class discussions I revisited the question, "Are we forming a community?" The students were extremely receptive. I'll hypothesize that having students examine online participatory culture in tandem with an online course set up through a blog site fostered more critical engagement. The students stopped seeing the desks and the teacher station of the traditional classroom and they started seeing it as a community where they were actively shaping the learning space.