Now You See It: A Review

I just finished writing a review for Cathy Davidson’s new book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way we Live Work, and Learn. I want to share some of the key points because it’s honestly one of the most interesting and relevant books I’ve read in a while.

Davidson's Now You See It via The Daily Beast

In Now You See It, Davidson offers a counter-narrative to the argument that we are no longer able to pay attention because technology is negatively affecting how we think and act. Davidson frames her narrative around attention, claiming that the collaborative nature of new technologies can help us fill in the gaps of what we wouldn’t normally see or think.

I valued “Part Two: The Kids Are All Right” the most for its arguments about dismantling what we know and value about education. Exploring pedagogy, teaching, and assessment practices, Davidson seeks to answer the question, “What if instead of telling [students] what they should know, we asked them?” (62).

• Chapter Three, “Project Classroom Makeover,” is an argument for a decentralized, student-driven pedagogy, a new form of attention and learning, and a focus on crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is the collaborative effort to solve a problem, and it values differences, unpredictable exploration, and direct collaboration with people who are affected by the issue being explored (65).

• Chapter Four, “How We Measure,” explores assessment and alternatives to standardized testing. Davidson argues that we need to imagine assessment in ways that will measure “practical, real-world skills” such as time management, communicating with others, making sound judgments, and determining credibility (127-8).

• Chapter Five, “The Epic Win,” explores the benefits of mirroring education on real-life applications and gaming principles. Davidson stresses game play as a mode of learning, citing improvements in attention, strategy, thinking interactively, visual judgment, motor skills, short-term memory, cooperation, and team-building skills.

• Throughout this section, and the rest of the book, we see an argument for unlearning conceptions about dis/ability and which students can (and cannot) succeed within the classroom. Davidson writes, “The assumption here is that kids are being ruined by technology. They are disabled, disordered—and disorderly” (152). She reacts strongly against this assumption, arguing that there is no measurable evidence that “digital-era kids” are worse than previous generations and that all students can succeed in the twenty-first-century classroom if the curriculum is adapted to meet students’ needs.

• Ultimately, Davidson argues for a reimagining of the education system that will better prepare students for a twenty-first-century culture and workforce.

Now You See It is a must-read for composition instructors. The humanities in general, and writing programs in particular, have been slow to adopt new technological practices and participate in projects that extend beyond individually-written academic texts. Davidson argues that we must promote collaborative student projects that encourage multiple perspectives, different mediums of expression, and inquiries that extend beyond the classroom.

In order to do this, we must reconceptualize our goals for composition: Is the goal of composition to teach students how to write? Or, do we want to teach students how to think critically, to incorporate different perspectives into their arguments, to learn and practice new literacies, and to contribute their strengths to particular rhetorical exigencies?

 

Davidson, Cathy N. Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. New York, NY: Viking, 2011.

 

Skype Interview with Adam Banks

Adam Banks is a really smooth speaker, and we had a great discussion about community work, critically discussing race in the classroom, integrating useful technological practices, and how to make class spaces accessible.

Here are some quick highlights:

I see my main responsibility as helping my students to claim roles for themselves as intellectuals. To see themselves as doing intellectual work right here right now, not waiting until someone busts them with a piece of parchment, or a degree, that they can only access those conversations once they’ve graduated, but to take the responsibility that intellectual work requires now.

This says a lot about both Banks’ role as an instructor and as a community leader. As someone who does community work and values the intersections between academic and activist work, Banks’ emphasis on his students as intellectuals is very telling for how he sees them as agents of change.

We get the sense that access means we embrace everything. NO. We have to consciously ask the question, “What makes sense and why?”

In response to how he tries to use technology to create the “transformative access” promoted in Race, Rhetoric, and Technologies, Banks told us that the main point to remember with bringing technology into the classroom is that we have to think critically about those choices. That is, we can’t just bring in technology because something’s shiny and new; it has to be relevant and useful for students.

These different language varieties are strengths rather than something that somehow has to be accounted for, dealt with, something that’s just a challenge.

One of the texts we have discussed throughout this course is Students’ Rights to Their Own Language. Banks spoke against taking a viewpoint that encourages students to embrace their own voices throughout the writing process yet penalizes them on the final drafts. He argued that we are not in charge of employing a “linguistic poll tax”; rather, we are in charge of teaching students how to be rhetorically agile and flexible.

If there is any area of the academy that is severely tokenized and placed into its own space, disability studies would be it.

I want to on this note because it’s part of the response to the question that I posed before: What intersections are there between African American rhetoric and the rhetorics of other students who are often cast in liminal spaces within the classroom? Banks spoke about looking at the intersections of different rhetorics as they relate to our particular interests–in his case, African American rhetorics. Banks explained his work as an attempt to move black rhetorical traditions away from the tokenized inclusion where they usually fall, which is where he saw the connection with dis/ability.

We covered a lot of ground with this discussion, and speaking with Banks was a great experience. Next week? Jonathan Alexander!

 

Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground

Recently, I read Adam Banks’s Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. According to Banks, this book’s project is not to answer either/or questions about technology, society’s development, and exclusion; instead, it traces the technologies used within the African American rhetorical tradition to unseat racism and exclusion based on technological practices (2). Very generally, then, this argument is one of access: access for African American to the dominant technologies of society in ways that are ethical.

Banks defines AA rhetoric as “the set of traditions of discursive practices—verbal, visual, and electronic—used by individuals and groups of African Americans toward the ends of full participation in American society on their own terms” (2-3). Here, Banks emphasizes technology and autonomy because, according to him, “technologies are the spaces and processes that determine whether any group of people is able to tell its own stories on its own terms, whether people are able to agitate and advocate for policies that advance its interests, and whether that group of people has any hope of enjoying equal social, political, and economic relations” (10). These opening points really resonated with me because I often explore access in terms of rural populations, across lines of gender, and (more recently) through the lens of dis/ability. Like others in comp/rhet, who Banks blasts for ignoring the “convergence of race a technology” (15), I have not paid due attention to these drastic inequalities.

When people first started talking about the Digital Divide, it was discussed in terms of material access. For example, rural populations didn’t have access to internet technologies. Neither did poor urban populations nor minority populations. White middle- to upper-class males were most privileged to this access. Since the early 2000s, studies have been published that have noted a balance in terms of gender and many other inequalities. However, as Banks notes, material access is only a single facet of a wider access:

The problem with the Digital Divide as a concept for addressing systematic differences in access to digital technologies is that it came to signify mere material access to computers and the Internet, and failed to hold anyone responsible for creating even the narrow material conditions it prescribed. 41

Banks breaks access into five separate parts: material, functional, experiential, critical, and transformative.

• Material access: “equality in the material conditions that drive technology use or nonuse” (41);
• Functional access: “knowledge and skills necessary to use technological tools effectively” (41);
• Experiential access: “access that makes the tools a relevant part of [the users’] lives” (42);
• Critical access: “understandings of the benefits and problems of any technology well enough to be able to critique, resist, and avoid them when necessary as well as using them when necessary” (42);
• Transformative access: “genuine inclusion in technologies and the networks of power that help determine what they become, but never merely for the sake of inclusion” (45).

The material is the foundation for all other types of access, and as we progress through these different categories, we (ideally) gain privilege to the transformative access that allows us to be part of the networks of power. In order to make it there, Banks writes, “We must know how to be intelligent users, producers, and even transformers of technologies if access is to mean anything to our individual lives, the lives of our students, or those of the communities we live, work, and play in” (138).

In order to gain that ultimate access, Banks asserts that writing teachers must take the initiative to teach students how to use technology, both as writing tools and also as systems of knowledge-making. For those unfamiliar with how to do this, Banks offers steps:

• Start slowly.
• Only use technologies to meet your curricular goals.
• Let (or make) your students teach you.
• Don’t be scared of recreational uses of technologies.
• Don’t just produce customers. 139-40

I’m interested to know what intersections Banks sees between African American rhetorics and feminist or dis/ability rhetorics, and whether he sees these classroom practices as applicable to a wider range of traditionally-marginalized student populations. Luckily, he will be Skyping into our class tomorrow, and I imagine he will have much to say about his own pedagogy!

Banks, Adam J. Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2006. Print.