Blogging Pedagogy

This isn't so much about pedagogy I have enacted, but rather that I have experienced, and which was profoundly affective. I'm still trying to process it, and determine what, if any, value Sirc's disruptive Happening pedagogy might serve in my First-year pedagogy. If a group of dedicated and frequently brilliant grad students only barely handled it (and some didn't quite do) how might First-years respond?

For the graduate seminar I attended Thursday evening, we had read Geoffrey Sirc's English Composition as a Happening, the premise of which is that the discipline of Composition too easily abandoned the psychedelic hippy ideas of the 60s and 70s in favor of social-epistemic rhetoric.

A primary element in the Happening movement was disruption: of genres, of language, of the expectations of the academy. My two classmates, E and R, who were leading the class discussion, decided it would be illustrative to engineer a persistent disruption of our class meeting. To that end, they had filmed a colleague, D, doing odd and random stuff while sitting at a desk.

Once the class discussion was well and truly underway, this film suddenly started playing on the classroom's screen, with sound. Only a couple of us knew this would happen (the instructor was in the know and had approved it). Most of us had no idea how to react. For the next hour or so, the film played on. Sometimes (rarely) we stopped to listen to what D had to say, or watched his antics. Other times (mostly), we talked over him.

To say that the experience was disturbing would be an understatement. Several times I felt the tension so strongly that I had to fight the urge to yell aloud and tell everyone to just shut up, because I couldn't think straight. But I suspected what they were up to and played along. The instructor, C, followed the same tack. At the end of E and R's segment of the class, they had a series of metacognitive questions for us, asking for our reactions to the disruption they had brought into the class.

This is when all hell broke loose. While several of us admitted to being discomfited, two students were angry and hurt, and one went completely ape-shit, yelling and swearing about the lack of respect E and R had shown the class as both an enterprise and as an assemblage of serious scholars. This student, K, is one of E's good friends outside of class. She became so incensed that she went home at the break instead of returning to class. I heard through the grapevine today that she sat up all night angry and sick, unable to sleep.

I had a chance to talk to R Friday, and ask him about the experience. He said it was a lot like a psychedelic trip in some ways, and was designed to overwhelm our normative expectations through sensory overload and trampling on our customary rules of discourse. I talked to C, the teacher, and he's deeply concerned about how emotional the meta part of the discussion became--but he says he felt committed to letting the scenario play out, and didn't realize how wound up K and the other freak-out victim were getting until they exploded.

There may be serious repercussions from this experiment in the friendships of some of the participants, but I think the presenters chose brilliantly. They demonstrated with scalpel-like precision the need for—and effects of—exactly the kind of disruption they brought to the class. I'm glad I was there! More reflection is needed.