Last Tuesday in class we discussed our positions as authority figures in the classroom and what we've done when that authority has been challenged. Wednesday I checked my WSU email and found a very long, very adamant email from the boyfriend of one of my students, arguing against my use of Twitter in the classroom. He attacked Twitter as non-academic since it is a social networking site, and he cited two of my posts which had "nothing to do with the course." He also copied the English department chair and two academic advisors. I spent some time composing my reply, which further explained why I use Twitter, account settings he could change so that he didn't have to worry about viruses or receiving tweets after ten p.m., and that the two "unprofessional" tweets were going to be used in class as examples of audience and subject appropriateness when messages are in the public venue. He replied back (again, a very detailed message) still arguing against Twitter as a non-academic tool, that I hadn't used those tweets in the class (we haven't addressed audience yet), and again copied the same people.
In an environment where we're being asked to use technology in the classroom (and I fervently believe in it; the courses I've taught and taken that didn't involve technology tended to have more "sleepers" in them than those that activity used computers or other technologies), this student seemed to be arguing against it. In his second reply, however, he mentioned that he is a network engineer. That is when I realized he wasn't arguing against technology in general, but at what he perceived to be a blurring between the academic and social worlds. For him, my hybridizing my technical and professional writing course with a "social networking tool" (it's so much more than that) challenged his definition of school and professionalism. For him, school is indeed what Bizzell called "a 'tidy house' within the academy" (45), a place where boundaries are not crossed or questioned.
Bizzell quotes Bahri that while hybridity is "useful in undoing binaries and approaching the complexities of transnationalism... I would warn that it also tends to avoid the question of location because it suggests a zone of nowhere-ness, and a people afloat in a weightless ether of ahistoricity" (46). "Suggest" I think is the key word, because it doesn't necessarily create that zone. In fact, Stuart Hall, in Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, stated:
My own sense of identity has always depended on the fact of being a migrant... (now) I find myself centred at last. Now that, in the postmodern age, you all feel so dispersed, I become centred: what I've thought of as dispersed and fragmented comes, paradoxically, to be the representative modern experience... welcome to migranthood! (15)
I have to agree with Hall, and Bizzell also mentions that "what is crucially left out of my 'Hybrid Academic Discourses' analysis is the profound cultural mixing that has already occurred in the United States" (54). I live in a contact zone; I am a hybrid of Cherokee, Choctaw, and Scottish; my sister-in-law is Chinese American. As a child, I had best friends that were Catholic, Mormon, Muslim, Jewish, Black, White, Korean, Mexican. Being exposed to so many different religions, races, and cultures really helped enforce in me that there is no one way of doing things, and thus, even in Freshman Composition, no one way of writing. In fact, my writing has been criticized for using the majority of the traits Bizzell lists as marking hybrid academic discourses (61). But writing, at least for me, is no longer about the traditional academic essay; that is writing for one very specific discourse community, and my goal is communication. I want to welcome students into writing, not force it on them; I want them to explore their culture and American culture (and the places where they intersect), and grapple with identities and values that are always in negotiation with the environment.
As far as my anti-Twitter student and her boyfriend, well, they don't have to like using Twitter and they don't have to use it a lot. I don't enjoy spending hours and hours revising to turn my writing into a traditional academic paper, but I know how to do it and I understand why it's useful. I hope that these two students will learn how to use Twitter, and understand that there are situations in which tools like Twitter can be useful -- even in professional and technical writing.
The one thing that did amuse me about Bizzell is at the end of "Hybrid Academic Discourses" she states that she encourages her "students to cannibalize earlier papers for parts to use in later papers" (65) and then proceeds to close the essay with a significant block quote she used in her essay on basic writing.
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