Technological Nostalgia and the Academic Year to Come

Eric Detweiler — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 18:13:30 +0000

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I feel so out of touch when it comes to video games.

During my time in the Digital Writing and Research Lab, I've worked to incorporate new technologies and media into my scholarship and pedagogy: I've published webtexts, rhetoric podcasts, and--as you might have guessed--blog posts about pedagogy. I've had students in my classes record podcasts of their own, collaborate on wikis, and use digital platforms to create visuals. But despite their vast array of pedagogical possibilities, I've yet to bring video games into the classroom. After all, the most recent gaming console I own is the eight-year-old (eight years old?!) Nintendo Wii, which--let's be honest--I mostly use to watch Netflix.

Except, that is, for a few months last fall when I got my hands on a Wii Classic Controller.

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image via Amazon.com

This controller is not exactly a groundbreaking piece of technology. In fact, it's decidedly backwards, a way of retrofitting the Wii's more innovative controller so you can use the console to play games from past platforms. In my case, the game in question was Mario Kart 64, an eighteen-year-old game (EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD?!) and the only multiplayer game at which I've ever been any good. As I lack both the hand-eye coordination required by many newer games and the funds required to purchase newer consoles, Mario Kart 64 still represents--alongside the halcyon days I invested in the Final Fantasy games released for the first-generation PlayStation--the pinnacle of my gamerly achievements. So, following my accomplishment of a key graduate-school achievement, I used the classic controller to descend into a few days of '90s nostalgia. With my good friend Toad, I sped across 64-bit beaches, turnpikes, and boardwalks. I won gold cups and blasted my competitors with heat-seeking turtle shells. I drove, I raced, I karted. And then, eventually, I felt the pull of responsibility, put down the controller, and picked up my copy of Maurice Blanchot's The ~~Racing~~ Writing of the Disaster. Done with krashing karts, I returned to the various spin-outs of scholarly writing.

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image via Fanpop

Which is to say that it's all too tempting for me to shake my head at undergraduates these days, what with their fourth-generation PlayStations, eighth-generation Mario Kart games, Steam accounts, and Flappy Bird victories. Soon, Beloit College will release their "mindset list" for the class of 2018 and surely give those of us who teach them--whether we're 27 or 72--plenty more excuses to panic about students' cultural touchstones.

My hope for myself, though, as I begin academic year 2014-15, is that I can resist such allergic reactions to students' cultural and technological habits. Following the suggestions of John Warner, I'd hope to avoid projecting my own anxieties about and lack of discipline with digital technologies onto my students--at least not without first asking after my students' relationships with technologies new and old. This strikes me as one of the many tensions teachers--perhaps especially teachers of rhetoric, writing, and composition--must constantly balance: Resisting the urge to fume at and dismiss technologies with which we're unfamiliar while also resisting the urge to celebrate technologies about which we know very little for the sake of novelty alone or as part of some dream about the inevitable march of progress.

What excites me about the digital rhetoric classroom--the reason that maybe I should work harder to plug post-millennial video games into my classroom, and that I'm excited about the work the DWRL's new Video/Games group will undertake in the coming year--is how fruitful a place it can be for negotiating and questioning this tension. With any new technology--even the most seemingly ubiquitous--at least a few students in any given class are going to be disoriented by it. And at the very least, perhaps we as teachers will be disoriented by it (or, in the spirit of dissoi logoi, we can pretend to be). The digital rhetoric course, in short, can be a place not for socializing students back into old forms of composition, nor for naturalizing new technologies into institutional structures, but for denaturalizing both our own and our students' expectations about and approaches to various technologies, forms of communication, and ways of being--from the ancient art of Mario Kart 64, to the crystallized realms of academic English, to the technological relations that may only come into existence in the courses we teach this fall and in the future.

Helping Students with Invisible Disabilities

Foley — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 05:00:00 +0000

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Marjorie Foley

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Leo Reynolds via The National Benefit Authority

I teach The Rhetoric of Harry Potter, which has an exceedingly long waitlist—for the past two semesters, the waitlist consisted of 50 UT seniors, and for awhile I couldn’t figure out why the 23 students in my class weren’t all seniors, especially since it looked like underclassmen didn’t even have a chance to get on the waitlist. After the first week or so in the semester, I found out why I had a mix of seniors, juniors, sophomores, and freshmen: a large number of my students have disabilities recognized by Students for Services with Disabilities, which allowed them to register during priority registration ahead of seniors.

About 50% of my class turned in letters from SSD, and there may still be more who have said nothing. Though these letters don’t relate the nature of their disabilities, and it would be impossible to tell from looking at them that they were disabled, many of my students have told me in confidence that their accommodations are related to anxiety disorders and other mental health disorders. As a result of their anxieties, my students often panic about the quality of their work and due dates.

They’ve also expressed anxieties about coming to see me in office hours when they’re worrying about upcoming due dates or when they’ve fallen behind on assignments. When you have one or two students with disabilities, it might be easy to become annoyed with the one student who can’t make due dates and who won’t come see you, even when you know that the student can and will perform at the A level on writing assignments. When you have ten (and counting) students with disabilities, it’s no longer an option. You can’t get annoyed; you have to find solutions.

As grad student instructors, I think many of us are aware of the dreaded Impostor Syndrome, the anxiety that comes with writing three 20-page papers in one week, and the dread we feel when we submit our writing to our peers, our advisors, and academic journals. And, we may have had the misfortune of being told to get our acts together by people who weren’t so nice about it, and the fortune to have supportive friends and advisors who tell us to do the same thing sympathetically.

In the classroom, I’ve never really been a hand-holder. I’m easily annoyed when students expect me to behave maternally. I’m even more annoyed when students don’t turn papers in on time because it throws off my schedule for grading them. But with so many intelligent students falling behind, I had to do something. I had to be sympathetic. I had to remember all the times that I was freaked out about a due date, overextended with extracurriculars, and terrified that my instructor would say, as one undergraduate advisor said to me, “Why are you here? Can you make this quick?”

I think our lack of sympathy as instructors and advisors comes from too much emphasis on student independence, without realizing that the first step toward independence for students with disabilities will be realizing there’s a problem and asking for help. I’ll just go ahead and say that’s the first step for all students, which is why my syllabus this year includes this: “Help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it.” As instructors, we should be aware that students who seem needy may just be on their way to becoming more, rather than less, independent.

Blogging Pedagogy - anxiety

Technological Nostalgia and the Academic Year to Come

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wii classic.jpg

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Helping Students with Invisible Disabilities

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