JODY SWILKY: After leaving Albany I took an academic position at
Drake University in Des Moines, joining an English department that
intended to make a wholesale revision of its curriculum, moving from the old
smorgasbord of categories structured by nationality and periodicity to one more
informed by writing and reading as interdependent activities. Everyone would be
responsible in varying degrees for teaching reading-and-writing intensive courses, and I was hired to teach a
range of these courses, including “Freshman Seminar in Reading and
Writing,” “Reading and
Writing Poetry,” and “The Teaching of Writing: Theory and Practice.”
I was also asked to develop new courses in literacy, cultural studies, and
writing. I was excited by this possibility, despite the fact that I was not
thrilled about moving to Des Moines, a
sentiment that has changed radically over the years. What attracted me was the
fact that the department was interested in revising its programs and informing
them by theoretical and pedagogical developments that recently emerged in
writing studies and cultural studies—developments that
dominated my graduate work at Albany.
I remember coming across an interview with Jane Tompkins that would be critical
to the writing and teaching I wanted to pursue:
Although I didn't realize while I was in graduate school and for
the first twenty years of teaching that I really aspired to be a writer more
than a critic, now that I have made this crossover, I'm absolutely delighted.
Let me say, though, that I think it's a false dichotomy: a scholar/critic
versus a writer. It's a dichotomy we've all been sold in some way by the
tradition we work in, and it's not useful to us anymore.
-from "Jane Tompkins and the Politics of Writing,
Scholarship, and Pedagogy" Interview in JAC: A Journal of Composition
Theory)
KIRPAL GORDON: I saw you erase such dichotomies with the
journalism & creative writing students you taught at Arthur Kill CF, but it
sounds like the SUNY-Albany program helped you combine your skills as a
teacher-poet-writer-critic-activist in new ways.
JODY SWILKY: The graduate courses at Albany that had
the most invigorating impact upon me were the courses that encouraged me to
blur distinctions between writing and criticism, between aesthetic and critical
writing. The English department at Drake seemed interested in people who had
training in multiple fields or divisions within a discipline, who, for
instance, had attended an MFA program
and pursued doctoral work in writing studies or cultural theory, and who could
contribute such training to the curriculum revision initiative. I wanted to
teach courses and produce writing that was informed by tensions between and
intersections of storytelling and rhetoric. I wanted my writing to take an
ethnographic approach to studying culture, to study and use language in
multiple ways that
challenged traditional divisions between notions of the creative and the
critical, between academic and journalistic writing, and between storytelling
and critical analysis. After a few years of continuing to produce writing that
served to preserve the conventions of genres, I embarked upon a decade-long
collaboration with Daniel Mahala, another Albany grad, that produced writing
that integrated storytelling and cultural theory, both our own and the work of
other writers, illustrating how storytelling was being performed in multiple
academic disciplines—in critical legal studies, in literacy studies, in
anthropology, in the social
sciences, and in literary theory—constructing a layered essay that advocated
making story, testimony and the personal central to academic writing. Much of
this writing captured the struggle to represent a fuller self, one that engages
and exploits the conventions of academic writing while using language that
enables writers to work towards their particular intentions.
The storytelling in a number of our essays took various forms, sometimes
appearing as nonfiction, other times seeming more like fiction. Whatever
writing strategy we employed, narrative translated abstract concepts into a
representation of lived experience. The crossover that JAC promoted,
what Tompkins advocated in her interview, enabled my collaborator and me to
continue to build on the work supported by the doctoral program we attended,
which attracted a group of people who were making crossovers: a published
playwright working on a doctorate on avant-garde contemporary performance
theory; an erstwhile journalist working on a theory of documentary filmmaking;
an engineer writing a multi-genre dissertation, capturing, through poetry and
prose, his interpretation of William Carlos Williams’ epic poem, Paterson;
and a good number of card-carrying, MFA program grads engaged in
projects concerned with theories of storytelling, composing, and
collaboration—three activities that would begin to inform the work I produced
after I left the program.
KIRPAL GORDON: Talk more about ethnography as a means or method
to understand culture. What inspiration did you draw from that study?
JODY SWILKY: Modern ethnography appears in several forms, traditional
and innovative. As an academic practice it cannot be separated from
anthropology. Seen more generally, it is simply diverse ways of thinking and
writing about culture from a standpoint of participant observation.
(James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography,
Literature, and Art)
In 1988, James Clifford’s seminal study of Western ethnography
was published, offering an important critique of how anthropology, travel
writing, collecting, and museum displays of tribal art represented culture and
cultural groups. Clifford offered an alternative practice which, as the
quotation just displayed suggests, called for a more inclusive perspective on
who might study culture, and through example, how writing might include the
voices of those being studied while serving their interests.
That same year, The Thin Blue Line was released. Errol Morris’
groundbreaking documentary depicts the story of Randall Dale Adams, a man
convicted and sentenced to die for a murder he did not commit. Adams’ case was
reviewed and he was released from prison approximately a year after the film’s
release. He told reporters,
“The fact that it took 12 and a half years and a movie to
prove my innocence should scare the hell out of everyone in this room and, if
it doesn’t, then that scares the hell out of me.”
The integration of an investigative perspective with the
aesthetics of filmmaking is the hallmark of Morris’ documentary, which weaves a
thread of reenactment, of dramatic storytelling, with interviews, plus a
multitude of images—of faces, newspaper headlines, street, maps and
buildings—presented through imaginative camerawork and pacing—zooming in and
out, spanning landscapes and rooms, capturing and dispersing colors, and moving
to the hypnotic effects of Phillip Glass’s score. The film lets us know we are
in the presence of filmmaking. The results were art and social justice.
Clifford’s and Morris’ work
opened up possibilities for studying culture, particularly who contributes,
and what materials and representational strategies are used, to construct and
capture their storytelling; and in distinct ways, their work complemented how
writing and filmmaking can serve the social interests of the individuals and
groups being studied.
Over the past decade, within writing studies, there has been increasing concern
about the relationship between words and images, what Kristie Fleckenstein has
described as a shift from “a language-centric to a polymorphic
literacy,” a response acknowledging that “meaning shapes itself in
response to the dictates of different media, modes and contexts of
representation,” what she deems a necessary response in this post-Gutenbergian,
image-dominated age, in which we are subject to an unending stream of information-melding
words with mental, graphic and verbal imagery. If we fail to account for how
imagery affects our understanding of experience, Fleckenstein argues, we limit
how richly we can understand the world that impinges on us. This suggests a new
possibility for composing culture—a transformation from creating images only
through language to working with multiple kinds and modalities of
images—graphic, verbal, and mental—the product being a text that does not
abandon language but rather incorporates multiple semiotic systems.
Possibilities can represent opportunities as well as
challenges. Since Clifford’s book and Morris’ film were released,
academics who previously wrote about culture, primarily for a specialized
audience, have begun to work in documentary film.
KIRPAL GORDON: How did your interest in making documentary film
come about? Did you seek out the work of other academics?
JODY SWILKY: Since I began work on a documentary in 2005, I have
attended dozens of screenings by first-time, academic filmmakers, who had
little or no formal training in filmmaking or prior experience adapting their
writing for a non-specialized audience. These events have caused me to
think more about the challenges of transitioning and adapting, including working
with multiple semiotic systems, negotiating the interests and desires of
different audiences, and establishing ethical participant-observer
relationships with the culture being studied.
A significant challenge has been moving from working with
images through language to composing culture through multimodal texts, moving
from reading and hearing language to considering how language works with
visual images and sounds—and how that might affect the
listener-reader-viewer.
I remember in the late 1970s and early 1980s theories of
image-making that stirred my interest. There was Pound’s misreading of the
Chinese, captured in “The Chinese Character as a Medium for Poetry,” which
might have had the linguistic substance wrong, yet his theory represented a powerful
way of thinking about constructing images: placing perceptions side by side, as
if they were ideograms.
KIRPAL GORDON: Would you give us an example from your own poetry?
JODY SWILKY:
Shared Music
They sang the same songs for years,
in the dark, across a continent,
sometimes awake at dawn,
humming to a frosted window.
Years would pass before they danced
to ballads in a shadowy room,
careless of stepping
on each other’s toes.
The muted trumpet lingered
and something burned their faces—
the remains of an incredible embrace,
the body speaking a startling language,
the way the woman who just left her lover
and now arrives home,
suddenly stops smiling, then smiles again,
surprised by her daughter’s laughter.
The final stanza of the poem, read line by line, embodies how
the body speaks a “startling language.” Collectively, the lines of the final
stanza create the stages of the experience—departure, arrival, readjustment,
and surprise. A sequence of perceptions, of scenes, each ordinary in itself,
yet as you read through them, each can carry the residue of the previous
images, accumulatively creating new meaning.
KIRPAL GORDON: To make the old new, to express the “startling
language” hidden within the everyday that yields those haiku-ish, satori-like
eurekas—you’ve wrought the best of Pound’s misreading of Fenolossa. You’ve made
good on other influences, too, yes?
JODY SWILKY: Another theory of image-making that influenced my
work in language was that of the deep-image aesthetic. I was taken by the
notion of a poem playing states of being against each other, or building and
possibly provoking a more imaginative state of consciousness. Some poems I
wrote about seeing and the imagination attempted to exploit a tension between common
visual images and images that aren’t of the natural world.
KIRPAL GORDON: Would you illustrate the tension in a poem?
JODY SWILKY: An example appears at the end of this poem:
Animation
A man walks through a district
of perfume and dress shops,
and wherever he turns,
whatever his eye might spot
through the sunlight, shadow,
and damp odor of traffic,
he sees only the cold beauty
of women in windows.
If a mannequin leans,
offering her perfect hand,
or the woman sitting in bed
whispers a few words,
he knows, as the body absorbs
sight and sound, they're calling him.
And if they stand as stiff as plaster,
he thinks each inviting gesture
is saved until the streets empty,
until his fingers touch luminous glass,
leaving a handful of kisses
on their billboard smiles.
The closing image of the poem works with what can be seen, a
common image in advertising, and what must be imagined, an almost magical
gesture of affection for one’s own creation, the animated inanimate object—the
mixing of language of intense desire with that of simulated beauty.
KIRPAL GORDON: Perhaps on the other side of affection for one’s
creation there’s a loneliness inferred in those last lines as well: is the
fetish defeating the real thing? Is kissing the “cold beauty / of women in
windows” a sad confirmation that he can’t get no satisfaction, that he’s hooked
on image? The ad’s reflection in glass lends this reader to re-think ideas
about beauty, flesh, desire, artifice, propaganda, advertising, manipulation,
the politics of the female body & the separation from nature/woman inherent
in your cityscape. After reading your collaborations with Daniel Mahala, I find you’re
packing a punch akin to this Deep Imagism in your essays.
JODY SWILKY: The hybrid collaborative essays were enabling new
territory for critiquing culture, and although they used storytelling to
capture institutional, programmatic and disciplinary situations, they
represented a divided writing identity, what seems to me more critical than
creative. Later, when I found myself working in a multimodal medium
(film), I sensed a more balanced construction of aesthetics and critique, which
emerged by working with multiple forms of images, created through the
linguistic, the visual, the aural, and most important, through the integration
of the three—through how they present image, story, critique and
argument—and consequently produced a critical aesthetic through the composing
of culture that worked against a divided disciplinary identity. A writer-critic, if you will.
I have been considering these challenges of representation and
collaboration ever since I worked on A Little Salsa on the Prairie, the
documentary I wrote and co-produced. What I mean
by representation is the way one or more modes of symbolic representation are
used to construct the story and the perspective(s) from which a story is told;
in other words, issues of composing and storytelling which often blur or are
interdependent.
Vivian de Gonzalez Transcript
You know, when I got here to Perry, ah, and people would look at
me they thought, oh, you know, she doesn’t understand English, she’s Spanish
speaking, she, you know, she doesn’t understand, but not knowing that, you know
I am, I did speak English, and I am an American and um, I’ve, I’ve had to have
proved myself not only once but twice because I have to prove myself not only
to my own people but to the Anglo population too.
Now I would like you to watch and listen as Vivian speaks: Go
to
You know, when I got here to Perry, ah, and people would look at
me they thought, oh, you know, she doesn’t understand English, she’s Spanish
speaking, she, you know, she doesn’t understand, but not knowing that, you know
I am, I did speak English, and I am an American and um, I’ve, I’ve had to have
proved myself not only once but twice because I have to prove myself not only
to my own people but to the Anglo population too.
When I first read Vivian de Gonzalez’s account of how she was
perceived after her arrival in Perry, I had not seen film footage of her
interview. My response to the transcript was that there was an important
message in her explanation that addressed a fundamental problem in
understanding the relationship between recent Latino immigration and the
identity of New Iowans, as well as the consequences of this misunderstanding. I
initially decided against using this footage to open the film, however, because
I felt unsure about the syntax and how that might come across to viewers. But
when I viewed the footage and listened to the speaker—after seeing her face and
body, and noting her body language; after hearing the register of her voice,
the pace and emphasis of her phrasing; and imagining music accompanying the
footage—I had a different response. Her presence as speaker made the
written text particular, personal, as she infused the text with pauses,
emphasis and emotion. When I read the transcript, I could construct an image of
her, but now her visual presence affected any image I previously had. My method
became: listen, look and read.
Along with the challenge of the medium for composing culture,
there has been the matter of approach. When I consider the structure of A
Little Salsa on the Prairie, the challenges of representation and
collaboration become entwined. Moving from the past to the present, from
reconstructing history to documenting a community-wide dialogue, we intended
that the role of residents would be enhanced as the story unfolded, and that through
this process, the competing interests and needs of the community would emerge.
The first chapter, which offers a historical view of Perry
through a perspective that considered the relationship between ethnicity,
industry and immigration, was constituted largely by archival images and
scholars’ voices. The ensuing chapter focused ONLY on the residents’ views
concerning the dramatic culture change of the 1990s, when Latinos came to work
at the meatpacking plant and settle in the community.
The next segment documents a dialogic process during which
residents met for five consecutive weeks in small groups,
followed by a community-wide forum, to discuss the challenges
the transformed community faced. Through the structure of the story, Perry’s
residents took a more active role as actors in telling the story. At the same
time, from the footage we shot and the archives we visited, we selected the
materials and we designed their arrangement, and thus the needs and interests
represented were not the result of our negotiating with the community. While
two rough cuts of the documentary were screened for several community groups,
and their feedback was taken into consideration, throughout the production
process, we did not work with members of the community on determining the
specific interests and concerns that would inform the film. Thus, it was our
representation of “their interests and concerns.”
What might have been the story if we had regularly negotiated the
content? We came closest to this approach to collaboration in the coda to
the film. Using Vivian de Gonzalez’s and Father David Polich’s uncut
representations of the religious ritual, replacing the voiceover with the
voices of two residents, each having a distinct story informed by their
connection to the ritual; consulting with them regarding the B-roll to
complement their narratives, we constructed the film’s coda. The process was
collaborative and the coda became a metaphor for collaboration, integration.
That was closer to what the politics of the both the film and filmmaking could
have been.
Despite the limitations of the project, I must say that it was an incredible
experience, as far as what I learned about writing grants and securing
resources, the tensions of studying and working with a community of people, the
tensions and revelations of collaborative work with an artist situated outside
academia, and the challenges of constructing
a product that integrates language, images, sound, and so on.
KIRPAL GORDON: What pieces of advice would you give to someone
just starting out?
JODY SWILKY: The most important thing about the grant world is
learning formulas and expectations.
The spectator-researcher subjectivity is much more complex, particularly
negotiating the fact that people who you care for are subjects of your work,
and you must hone your care and concerns for them in relationship to a story
you are striving to construct. That’s why in an interview format (section II of
the documentary), we let Anglo and Latino residents report on how they
responded to the dramatic culture change in the community, then followed these
interviews with a section shot more in cinema verite format, with the camera
rolling on the study circle groups, with people not as poised, not as careful
about expressing their views on immigration, assimilation, and culture change.
Then there is the tension of working with someone whose purposes and rhythms
differ from those of us trained and housed in academia. Based on my limited
experience, the academic and independent artist can have divergent priorities,
and different pressures can affect attention to phases of the project,
including research, writing, shooting footage, and editing. There are also
different realms of knowledge: for example, a videographer who works produces
work for the general public might think differently than an academic accustomed
to writing for a smaller audience. It certainly was a lesson in understanding a
new form of otherness.
I found myself in new territory in my work, and, dare I say, opening up new
territory for humanists at Drake. I was the first member of the humanities
faculty to get the highest level of support for a multimedia project ($15,000)
from Humanities Iowa, a state organization affiliated with the National
Endowment for the Humanities. The film project also received additional state
funding ($6,900) from Iowa Arts Council, and from a private foundation, Bock
Family Foundation ($7,500). Then there was the strange world of soliciting
funding form individuals and industry.
Commencing in the fall of 2006, I began a five-year period of
traveling and lecturing. There have been about 40 public screenings of the
film, on campuses and in communities, and I have spoken at many of these
events. The film has been aired several times on Iowa Public Television and was
shown for two years on The Documentary Channel which is available through
Direct TV. Finally, and perhaps most important to current and future research
projects, since 2008 I have been invited to give seven presentations on the
effects of recent immigration on Iowa and the
nation. The majority of the invitations have come form universities and
colleges, among them Technologico de Monterrey (Guadalajara, Mexico), Manhattan
College (New York, NY), SUNY at Geneseo (Geneseo, NY), Saint Mary’s College
(Moraga, CA), and St. Thomas Aquinas College (Sparkill, NY).
KIRPAL GORDON: Yikes, Jody, this sounds like the antithesis of
the stodgy academic life! You’re connecting with so many communities, you’re
constantly synthesizing feedback, you’re uniting people of a similar karass,
you’re engaging with one of our country’s biggest issues & you’re making a
difference to people who have not necessarily paid your employer any tuition.
JODY SWILKY: If I consider the historical trajectory of this
project, if I think about its evolution from applying for grants to the
recent presentation of the documentary in Mexico to an audience of
hundreds, many who have personally known someone who has been part of the
phenomenon over the past two decades of changing rural communities throughout North
America, I can say I have been engaged in what I think is a vital discussion
across our nation—how welcoming you will be to the new immigrants who are
changing our country. The disparate responses of people who have attended
screenings has engaged me in numerous discussions about divisive issues—what it
means to think of a human being as “illegal,” what should be the responsibility
of the government in promoting or restricting immigration from south of the Rio
Grande, the importance of precluding, restricting or enabling paths to
citizenship, and how fear and the unknown inform contrasting perspectives on
welcoming new residents of the U. S. These exchanges have taught me the
importance of using the documentary to promote discussions concerning the
historical causes of recent demographic change, the struggles and challenges
immigrants endure, and the contrasting consequences of recent immigration for
communities across the nation.
I often find my thinking aligned with a point that Sonia
Nazario raises in her national bestseller, Enrique’s Journey,
concerning the problem with the way we debate and legislate immigration: no
matter how legitimate, campaigns and law have had a “corrosive side effect”
(xiv). Recent immigrants’ presence in the United
States is deemed either good or bad,
reducing these individuals to a “cost-benefit ratio,” downplaying or erasing
the reasons for, as well as the struggles and effects of, immigration. While
immigrants’ stories about culture change, assimilation, and the future
frequently reflect the thinking that informs public debate, these narratives
simultaneously speak about experiences and identity in ways that complicate and
challenge the way public debate has defined the effects of immigration. Thus,
in our attempts to understand the meaningful possibilities for reform,
we need to look not only at the thinking that informs public debate and
produces legislation, but to the culture change in communities and the stories
their residents tell of the specific effects immigration has had on the quality
of life—for themselves and other residents of the community. That was a primary
objective of the documentary.
KIRPAL GORDON: So how has all this time in Iowa changed
you? What I mean is: don’t hak me a chaynik; you’re no less intense now!
JODY SWILKY: When I came to Des
Moines in 1988, some of my students and some locals considered
me a somewhat abrasive, perhaps too intense, Easterner, something of an
intruder from the East. My character and personality frequently clashed with
the dominant mores and attitudes. In one sense, this is a generalization; at
the same time, however, there were enough statements in student evaluations and
reactions from people in the community to suggest to me that I was somewhat of
an outsider. I have changed, and people who get to know me, at Drake and around
greater Des Moines, have
shown willingness to accept my contrasting ways. This sense of being “somewhat
different” has been useful to me as I presented the documentary across the
state, for it has helped me gain insight of our fears of otherness, whatever it
might be, whether it is among ethnic groups or my own intimate circles. So I
have learned more acceptance of the elderly Anglo woman from rural Iowa, who has
lived in a homogenous community all her life, and then experiences her
community undergoing rapid ethnic diversification. What a challenge for her
being confronted by dramatic culture change that can initially present too much
of the unknown. I have learned to be more attentive to, and accepting of her
fears, of the challenges she faces. It reminds me of a poem that I wrote
decades ago:
Nothing but Image
If I am amazed by anybody
it’s the bum on 34th
Street,
who bears the abuse
of executives and salesmen,
who smiles at secretaries
rushing past his ragged presence.
My father once told me:
Don’t trust these men with no purpose.
They seem harmless, he said,
but look hard and you might see
your own fallen image
fading across their faces.
So I turned my head and walked away.
But one night, in winter rain,
an old man mumbled,
spare change...
and I stared into his bloodshot eyes.
Water dripped down his face
like sweat, and his busted nose
broke the dark,
perhaps the proud wound
of a forgotten middleweight fight.
As I handed him some coins,
didn't he lower his head,
bless me, call me brother?
Now I love to look for those
whose faces and clothes deceive us,
this bum standing up
to the insults of the crowd,
who leaves us shaking our heads
and talking to ourselves
like men lost in the heart
of New York, in an
almost memorable past.
KIRPAL GORDON: You’re bringing me back to the 34th Street where we
first met---in publishing---in 1979 & now all these years later you have
created the life that poem suggested was possible to you, a life of looking
closer, of not being afraid to discover yourself in the face of the other &
sharing the methodology & the results.
JODY SWILKY: The transitions I have made in my writing and film
work have been possible in part because I have worked for several decades in an
institutional department that within a few years after I arrived let go of
artificial and unproductive divisions such as writer vs. critics, literary vs.
popular, high vs. low culture, and aesthetic vs. political. There
has always been a visible group of people within my department and the broader
institution that supported and encouraged work that did not preserve artificial
boundaries that limited the possibilities for expression and creation, among
them the role of writer-critic. (And there have been resources and
awards for connecting writing to teaching.)
In the early 1990s, soon after I arrived at Drake, a coalition of senior and
junior faculty advocated throwing out the well-established curriculum, those
containers informed by periodicity and nationality, replacing this common
curricular form with a more rhizomic structure—all courses connected by the
interdependence of reading, writing, and recent developments in theories of
discourse and culture, and courses branching out and building on each other. We
underscored students becoming close readers and serious writers, rather than
exposing them, primarily, to periods of literature and particular
author-figures.
We intended the emphasis on reading and writing to engage students in multiple
genres of writing, to engage canonical and non-canonical texts in the same
course, and to gain a sense that close reading and serious writing is valuable
in the here and now, as well as preparation for life and career after
graduation. Having gone to graduate programs that enabled me to work in
multiple genres of writing, often for the same course, I valued such experience
and applied it to designing courses that asked students to produce similar
projects in courses such as “Reading and Writing Place,” “Storytelling as a
Social Practice,” “English in America,” “Reading, Writing, and Making
Documentary,” and “Writing within and against Academic Discourse.”
I believe that students taking classes through my department are being given
the opportunity to read and write in ways that encourage creatively critical
attitudes toward texts and the world. What students miss in
coverage, they get double in opportunities to learn to be close readers of
texts, and to try out and develop different approaches to writing sanctioned
within and outside the academic institution.
It is probably a commonplace today to claim that meaningful teaching requires
that teachers take a philosophical attitude towards their work. To be
philosophical about teaching means to be aware of what one is doing and why,
which necessitates having, what Cy Knoblauch and Lil Brannon, two of my comp
mentors, have described as “an exploratory and reflective attitude towards
ideas, issues and questions” pertinent to how people learn and how they develop
as learners. In addition, a philosophical stance towards pedagogy requires that
teachers gain awareness of the values, attitudes and beliefs that inform
different teaching methods—those contrasting philosophical perspectives “on
language, on meaning, on communication, on learning, and on the ways of assisting
learning.” Awareness of the philosophical dimensions of teaching, Knoblauch and
Brannon contend, makes instruction “sensible and deliberate.”
I encourage the students I work with to take an attitude towards learning
similar to the philosophical stance that Knoblauch and Brannon advocate
teachers adopt towards pedagogy. I ask them to work towards developing this
stance as readers, writers and speakers because learning is a process of
exploring issues and ideas, coming up with provisional understanding and
reformulating beliefs through thinking, which is not likely to happen when
teachers locate themselves in the educational process primarily as figures who
profess knowledge that students passively internalize. What more meaningfully
serves the goal of students developing a philosophical attitude towards
learning is a pedagogy that underscores reading, writing and speaking as means
for producing and revising thinking, that makes the classroom a social space in
which students are expected to be active participants who collectively
interpret, discuss and debate issues, and that positions the teacher in
different roles necessary to facilitate and complicate such
learning.
The complications and difficulties my teaching poses for students
have to do as much with matters of (un)familiarity as with ideology. Students I
have worked with at Drake have had a variety of educational experiences, and
they exhibit different degrees of interest in and resistance to the demands of
my teaching. I have found it counterproductive to perceive students to be
generally anti-philosophical. Rather, it makes more sense to think about their
differences and potential as well as their limitations, and therefore recognize
that only some students present extreme resistance while others already show
interest, and many have the potential to become more philosophical about
learning.
The most meaningful way I know to counter student resistance to
my teaching is for students to see themselves change as readers, writers and
speakers, and in so doing, attain some genuine understanding of the value of
their learning. I ask them to engage in the processes of revision and
re-visioning. The first activity focuses on deepening one's interpretations and
arguments; the second, on seeing how they might interpret and argue
differently. I ask them to write and respond to each other’s work each week,
often for each class, and to understand that their individual and collaborative
work is produced and shared so they can see different possibilities for
understanding texts and the world, become more insightful at interpreting their
own and other students’ writings, and appreciate how thinking can change and
deepen through hard work. As someone responding to what they say and write, my
responsibility is not only to offer questions that help them deepen their
thinking and consider others ways of understanding what they write about, but
to provide questions and commentary that help clarify for them the
meaningfulness of any genuine changes in their thinking and
writing.
I am not suggesting that the method I have outlined nullifies
student resistance to developing a more philosophical stance towards learning.
A pedagogy that asks students to become more responsible for their learning
requires that many of them unlearn the way they have become accustomed
to performing in the classroom. However, my experience leads me to believe that
the different degrees of confusion and discomfort students experience can
eventually be perceived as productive if they receive support and gradually
recognize they are gaining something significant through their struggles. They
will always need to know that what they say matters, but it is reasonable and
necessary to increase expectations for their persuasiveness as they move
through this transitional process. That is why I believe in starting out where
students are, rather than where they “should” be, and gradually
complicating the challenges of learning. And those students who eventually
perceive their abandoning of ingrained behavior as more than simply giving up
how they have learned to perform, they will have begun to understand
differences in the values, attitudes and beliefs that inform teaching, and
thereby have become more philosophical about learning.
KIRPAL GORDON: One could also say that you’re facilitating
students in their building “a room of one’s own,” midwifeing their birth into a
fuller self, what once was called soul-making. You’re reminding me of that
Cassandra Wilson line from “Running the Voodoo Down,” “In this quiet place I
own, worlds are born.” So how can Giant Steps reader see your film, stay in
touch with all of that you do & when you will next be in their city or
town?
JODY SWILKY: I get what you are saying about those lyrics.
Thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to catch up with
you and share with your readers the projects I have been engaged in for several
decades.
It was a pleasure.
