In Which I Learned About the Underlife

This entry is running late. I apologize. I'm still traveling in Honduras. I hope to post on Saturday. Better late than never, I always say.

One of the many delightful aspects of studying communication is that the scholarship so often crashes into other fields. Robert Brooke's take on the Underlife is just such a delightful detour into sociology.

Brooke defines underlife as "the activities (or information games) individuals engage in to show that their identities are different from or more complex than the identities assigned them by organization roles" (p. 722) In class, we discussed how teachers can use this underlife to enhance student learning. It seems to me that Brooke's description of underlife in the writing classroom is about more than asserting identity. First, Brooke describes how students engage in asides during class, taking classroom activities and materials "which are purposefully different form those the teacher intended" (p. 724) It's interesting to me that if this underlife activity were teacher-directed, we would call it "higher order learning," but if it's student directed, it's an ever-so-slightly transgressive "underlife" activity in the eyes of some teachers.

Brooke also discusses another important aspect of the underlife: "information games." The students aren't solely asserting their identities when they are playing "information games." Brooke writes that students use information games to figure out how to "get by" or game the system "without losing themselves in its [the classroom's] expectations." (p. 726) I would argue that students aren't merely trying to assert independence from the system. They are also figuring out how to get the best grade for the least effort.

Isn't that OK? Isn't this the kind of behavior that we try to encourage and maximize in daily life? It seems to me that if our assessment methods are vulnerable to gaming to such an extent that a student who hasn't learned the material can still earn a good grade, they are inadequate. We know that even if students are intrinsically motivated to learn, they are extrinsically motivated by grades quite apart from this intrinsic motivation. (As pass/fail studies have shown.)

I like that Brooke takes a non-judgmental attitude toward "information games" because there is little point in deploring them. They are present in every kind of human activity, and the classroom is no exception. So what is a teacher to do with them?

In 2001 I was working in a small university in the Educational Technology Department. They made the entire campus a WiFi Hotspot (which was fairly rare in 2001) and issued each student a laptop computer. Many teachers simply forbad their students from opening their laptops in class. These were the teachers who liked to take roll, then stand at the front of the class and lecture for the entire class period. It seems that they saw anything but rapt attention and note-taking (on paper) as a violation of their divine right as the sage on stage. Of course, the students who would have been distracted by computers distracted themselves in other ways. They wrote notes, (as Brooke described) did homework or read for other classes, or daydreamed. To be sure, the computer offered even greater opportunities for distraction, but we argued (mostly unsuccessfully) that teachers could learn to use the computer in class to improve student engagement. I can think of several ways students could engage more effectively even with a traditional lecture, using a laptop computer. They could take notes collaboratively, annotate notes with additional sources, find competing viewpoints, and add multimedia content to their notes. But of course, the best use of classroom time is probably not the traditional lecture, especially in the writing classroom.

And I think his application of the underlife to the writing classroom is where Brooke gets really brilliant. If Dr. K. has told us once, he's told us a dozen times: student writing is too often (almost always?) a performance rather than a communicative act. This is where "getting by" and "gaming the system" become huge problems for the teacher. Because the student is thinking, "What does the teacher want?" instead of "How can I communicate?" Brooke writes, "if all our classrooms were to focus on fostering thee identities of students as thinkers in our disciplines rather than merely on transmitting the knowledge of our fields, then students might easily see the purpose for these particular 'information games.'" (p. 731)

So here's my question for you, dear commenter. How can a writing instructor encourage an undergrad to think of himself/herself as a producer of new knowledge, as an original thinker, as a writer rather than a teacher-pleaser? I think that one way is to devolve as much power in the classroom as possible to the student. The more I read in theory, the more I tend to think students should play a role in the creation of the syllabus, in deciding how they should be evaluated, and when projects are due. Is this too much to ask of an undergraduate? If we give students power in the classroom, are we helping them redefine themselves? I'd really like to hear what experienced teachers think.