ENGL 402 - Week 6

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Two readings in the GCP and one on Sakai.

[taylorcate]

Week 6 Reading Response:

I feel deeply aligned with the motives and theoretical influences of Community-Engaged and Feminist Pedagogies. A great deal of what we are trying to do in the MUDDLE project, and certainly what I hope to achieve later when we transform the project into a non profit organization, comes directly from community-engaged pedagogy: to facilitate purposeful, experiential, and reflective interactions between students and (otherwise) unanticipated communities. Despite being in its infancy as a project and publication, MUDDLE has managed to connect a number of individuals from varying cultural, technical, and creative backgrounds, all of whom understand the importance of describing the process of the individual to better drive the empathetic intelligence of the whole. In layman's terms: the better I know myself, the better I know you, and the more experience I have writing about my experience the easier it is for me and others to digest it. Our most active MUDDLEr is a graphic design whiz, stream-of-consciousness blogger, independent scholar, poet, and mother of three boys from France. We found her through GitHub where she was composing and archiving her blogs on her "techy" husband's suggestion. If Nadine hadn't been composing in a public, digital environment I would never have had the pleasure of forming such a rewarding personal and professional relationship with someone who has not only actively spread the mission of the project, but has directly informed my methodologies in MUDDLE as well as my other projects. From the perspective of digital humanities, this is a pretty successful collaboration model, especially for individuals who have never actually occupied the same space. Similarly, an archivist in Chile came across my other GitHub project and ever since we have been exchanging emails and comments on my Issues board. I had no idea my project could have that type of impact but, nevertheless, simply by doing my work in a public, digital space I invited in audiences I didn't know where out there.

There is unlimited potential for our digital environments to break down the barriers of proximity and classicism if active effort is made to democratize our technologies through our public education systems. Composition pedagogy's mission is to promote literacy—defined two ways by Dewey and Freire, "enabling learners to become active, critical, responsible participants in democratic processes" and later Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren as, "a critical reading of cultural texts and practices" (qtd in Julier, et al. 58)—and MUDDLE's mission is to do those things while also teaching users how to engage collaboratively in a developer workflow. If we could somehow find a way to integrate a MUDDLE framework into schools, we could help prepare students to learn computational languages or to move into computational sciences. I'm not sure there's a better way to "[distribute] agency and authorship" than to ask students to compose, commit, and comment on work in GitHub (Micciche 133). Students composing written assignments in GitHub, an environment not too unlike Sakai or other course management systems, will gain familiarity working in close, virtual collaboration with peers and potential publics. Regardless of future career, these are skills that will only help students as they go through college and enter their professional lives.