Finally, finally I’m returning to my posts on scholarship review, this time with Marilyn M. Cooper’s “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted,” which is in the February 2011 issue of College Composition and Communication. It’s taken me this long to get back to this in part because I’ve been swamped beyond repair with school stuff (indeed, I’m writing this post in 2-3 minute bursts yesterday and today in an effort to break up the marathon of grading, email catch-up, and other paperwork), but also because this is a long and complex piece. It’s a lot more “theory heavy” than what I’m used to with the CCCs, and frankly, it is a piece I have some complicated and mixed feelings about, as my headline might suggest, and it’s made me think. A lot. Continue reading “On Cooper’s “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted” (and Phillip K. Dick and porn)”
Das Gradeinator
I’ve been thinking about grading a lot lately– well, “lately” meaning the last year or so. I had a few thoughts about grading in general here last year, and also here, where I reflected on a particularly unpleasant discussion with a student about a grade on a project. At the end of last term, I had decided I was going to try an experiment in English 328, the “advanced writing” course of sorts I’ve taught at EMU dozens and dozens of times over the years.
Basically, what I did was this:
- Each student would submit a draft without their name on it for peer review. (I should mention a) I’m teaching online, so these students don’t necessarily know each other that well to begin with, and b) I combined two online classes into one big group, which I probably wouldn’t do again, but that’s a slightly different story).
- For each student’s essay, I created google docs survey with rubric/peer review questions, some very structured, some open-ended. That’s 28-30 or so surveys that are individual documents.
- Then I figured out who would review who, striving to make it so that no one reviewed each other– that is, student 1 reviewed students 2, 3, and 4; student 2 reviewed 5, 6, and 7; and so forth. This was a math problem for me that took a while to resolve.
- Then I distributed the still anonymous essays along with corresponding google doc links to each member of the class for them to fill out.
- Then, I collected those responses from the surveys, dumped the results into FileMaker, and then distributed them back to students in a readable fashion.
- After students received feedback from their reviewers, I then gave them the chance (via a SurveyMonkey survey) to review their reviewers on a simple number scale.
- And then, I more or less repeated the whole thing, but for the second time around, students assigned 100 out of the 150 points for the project as a grade (the other 50 points were tied to the “review of reviewers” and my own assessment).
- I reviewed the survey results for each student, read through each essay myself, assigned my portion of the grade, made any other adjustments I thought necessary (for example, when students clearly didn’t follow the assessment instructions), and then passed all of this back to students.
You got all that?
That was the “Gradeinator v.1,” or at least what I was calling it. A better name will need to be in place eventually for marketing purposes, I’m sure. Right now, I’m working with what I am calling “Gradeinator v.2,” where I attempted to use one very large SurveyMonkey survey (hundreds and hundreds of questions, with lots of skip logic) to handle all of the reviews. My theory was that this would be easier than Google Docs/Survey, but as I am going through and tabulating things now, I’m not convinced that is the case. That might be more about my lack of me knowing what I am doing more than anything else though; more on that in a bit.
Now, I suppose the first question any sensible person might have here is why in the heck would I do this in the first place? It’s certainly something I’ve wondered about myself, believe me.
Basically, I was trying to do three things. First– and I always knew this was a long-shot– I was trying to see if there was a way to save some time with grading. Second, I wanted to make peer review a little more systematic, and, by adding the anonymous feature, I wanted to make it a little more “honest.” My theory was that one of the reasons why students sometimes give kind of lame peer review was because they don’t want to hurt people’s feelings, and making things anonymous might make it more about the “writing” rather than the “writer.”
And third, I wanted to minimize my role as “the grader” and to empower the students as critics. This is an advanced writing class after all, one where must about all of the students in the class are hoping to be secondary school teachers or professional writers of some sort, and it seems to me worthwhile trying a different way to highlight the critique process. What I’m getting at is I wanted to find a way to emphasize my role of “facilitator,” while at the same time recognizing that the teacherly role of final decider really never goes away.
I’ve learned a lot already and I’m learning more; in no particular order:
- On the whole, this process has a certain amount of “truthiness” for me. I do think that the peer review is better through this more systematic “rubric” approach and also when its anonymous, though these peer reviews are far from perfect. My students tend to cautiously agree: they tend to see the advantages of anonymous peer review, but they also see problems with it, notably that it isn’t really possible to ask “follow-up” questions about particular points of critique. Though I should also point out that a lot of my students are thrown off by the “weirdness” of all this, and I am sure that the reviews at the end of the class will demonstrate that not everyone was on-board with this. I will also be taking a poll for the next big peer-reviewed assignment on the process that students want to follow, and the results of that poll might be telling.
- I like the process of reading students’ assessments and then making my own assessment, because what happens most/much of the time is I am able to build constructively off of my students’ comments. That makes me feel more “coach” and/or “team leader”-like, rather than the final judge/authority/teacher, if that makes sense. I have many more opportunities to say “I agree with what your peers said about your essay” with this set-up.
- But I have to emphasize most of the time and not all of the time, because even well-intentioned and earnest students have given some not excellent feedback. Even with a rubric and guidelines and my coaching/instruction and all the rest, much of the feedback has still been– to be blunt about it–irrelevant. I’m talking about critiques of font choices, how the pages are numbered (or not), really petty (and debatable) comments on grammar, etc. And then there were also a number of student reviews and assessments that are just lazy, comments along the lines of “good!” and just giving “A”s without anything remotely helpful. The kind of reviews that are useless to students are also impossible for me to build off of in any meaningful way. Though I know this is all part of the learning process and it appears that the comments on the Gradeinator v.2 are better.
- Anyway, the next time I do this (if there is a “next time”), I’ll be assigning points to students on the quality of their assessments, either instead of or in addition to the quality of their reviews. That’s the teacherly part of things, I suppose, but I kind of feel like some folks need to be held accountable for their less than stellar reviews.
- The technical part of the process– setting up the surveys, dumping the data into things like FileMaker, on and on and on– is an enormous pain in the ass, far far more time consuming and tedious than I had anticipated. It was a little easier to do this the second time around, but just a little easier. Of course, the thing is grading itself is kind of tedious, so I can’t really say if this is more or less tedious than the more traditional sitting down with a stack of essays with a pen. More time-consuming, but that’s slightly different.
- A lot went wrong, and went wrong in unanticipated ways. Some students filled out the wrong surveys. Some students supplied letters instead of numbers for grades, and it’s hard to average the letter “B” in with two other numbers. And when students are late in handing in work or in getting the surveys done, well, that can mess up the works for others– that is, if a student doesn’t do the peer assessment they were supposed to do, then that means one of her or his peers doesn’t get the feedback/grade.
I think the most useful, interesting, and/or frustrating part of this for me is what I’ve learned a lot about things like Google Docs and Excel, and I know even more clearly now that there is much I do not know about these things and much I wish I could know about relational databases and programming.
I do not know if this is actually true, but it feels to me like this is a system that could be largely automated. First, a student go to a web site and uploads her document for review. Then, probably based on being informed about this or maybe based on some sort of due date, that student goes back to that web site, enters in some identifying information, and she is then taken to the documents she needs to review. She completes them and submits them back to the system. Then, when her peers have completed their reviews of her project, the student receives an email alert and a link to review those reviews. And as an instructor, the idea is you can watch, participate, or otherwise intervene in the process.
If all this were possible– if this could be set up with some kind of content management system or other database program, and if it were easy enough to customize the rubric/review questions based on an assignment and goals and such– then it might both save a teacher some time and make for a richer teaching experience. Maybe that’s a big “if,” maybe not.
Anyone out there interested in a programming project?
The kids today and the internets
This is mostly a reminder post for 516 for winter 2012 (I assume I’ll be teaching it then) and some reading(s) I might want to add about participatory culture and digital natives, and it’s in my mind now because I literally came across both of these things almost at the same time while looking for other things.
First, there’s the book Born Digital, which looks like a much smarter version of the whole “digital natives” argument than Pensky. Along these lines is the web site/group Youth and Media.
Second, Clay Spinuzzi posted on his blog a useful review of Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century By Henry Jenkins with Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton, and Alice J. Robison, useful not only for his comments but also for the link to the book. Thanks Clay, and go read some more Jenkins– good stuff.
Another link round-up post
It’s been a crazy couple of weeks around here, all work work work work, and not the sort of work that is particularly interesting to blog about. All committees and inside department/program politics, things that are maybe interesting to an audience of a dozen people, tops, and often times things that are not interesting to even me.
EMU is on break this week, which will (hopefully) give me a chance to catch up on grading, reading, prepping for the rest of the term, and writing a couple of blog posts too. But while I’m sitting here watching the Oscars, I thought I’d go ahead and clear out the tabs in my browser and sort through my reader and post a bunch a links:
“Twitter’s five-year evolution from ridicule to dissidents’ tool,” from the Guardian UK, and “The ‘Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators’ Article,” both of which are articles about Twitter that I’m liable to in my current section of Writing for the World Wide Web. It’s a nice contrast of readings that say that Twitter is “all that” and that its not.
“Blogging high school teacher has no job — and no regrets.” This is one of many articles about a high school teacher named Natalie Monroe who was fired for a blog that was a bit too honest with her critiques of students. She is still blogging about all this at http://www.nataliemunroe.com/
The World’s Only Ass Kicking Machine. Something I could have used over the last month or so.
Slushpile Hell. Maybe this is why I gave up trying to write fiction.
“The truth about writers.” This is an oldie, actually, an op-ed piece from back in 2009 from the LA Times. But I think it’s pretty accurate and funny.
“How to Write Faster” from Lifehacker, which I guess might be helpful to the person who wrote that LA Times piece.
I am hoping to have more interesting things to say soon….
Scholarly reading blogging interlude: CCC, what’s with the “posters?”
Once again, I’m in that “completely swamped” territory of work stuff, this time more because of grading/assessment project I’ve nicknamed the Googledocs Gradinator 2011 v1.1-1.2. I’ll probably post about that soon– maybe yet this weekend as I finish up the first batch of grades/comments on projects for English 328. And I am actually in the process of reading things; right now, it’s Marilyn Cooper’s excellent essay in the most recent issue of College Composition and Communication on “agency,” a concept that proved to be quite thought-provoking in English 505 last fall. This is an essay that will probably find its way into that class the next time I teach it, and I really will be blogging about that some time next week.
But for the time-being: CCCs, what’s the deal with these “posters?”
I think this began a few issues ago with one about “the rhetorical situation” (complete with obligatory triangle), and the most recent ones are for “Literacy/Literacies” (December 2010) and “Genre” (February 2011). Of course, they aren’t posters at all, but rather one page pieces with some kind of graphic element (for “Genre,” it is a word cloud, which strikes me as a sort of odd choice, almost the use of a genre to define “Genre”), and “Literacy/Literacies” was accompanied by an image of the book cover from the 1917 textbook English Composition as a Social Problem. (?????)
As barest of bare bones summaries, I guess they are okay, but honestly, I can’t see giving either one of these to students as some sort of introductory piece to students. Maybe– maybe— they would be useful if my non-academic Mom asked me something like “dear, I read that people in your field are interested in ‘genre;’ what is that?” but how big of an audience is that, really? My reading of the validity of all of these posters to date has been “well, sort of,” not because they are not well written and inaccurate, but because they are attempting to define God terms that are too slippery for a less than 500 word summary.
So honestly, does anyone out there have a sense of the purpose of these things?
On Cosgrove’s “What Our Graduates Write” and Gogan et al’s “Research Centers as Change Agents”
Man, it’s been a couple of crazy weeks around here. It’s been a tsunami of teaching stuff (one experiment of which I might be blogging about soon), meetings up the ying-yang, reports/requests/documents/whatever to write, grad students interested in our MA program, program poli-ticks not worth explaining here, etc., etc.. And then there’s that pesky teaching thing, which I feel pretty far behind on too.
Anyway.
This is two-fer in my on-going reading and reviewing scholarship project, two pieces from the December 2010 College Composition and Communication. First, there’s Cornelius Cosgrove’s “What Our Graduates Write: Making Program Assessment Both Authentic and Persuasive.” This is an essay that starts out kind of slow for me, describing what I see as a fairly routine assessment of what graduates from writing programs end up doing. And I have to say that while I realize assessment work is important and a legitimate area of study and all that, I personally find it kind of boring.
But I like what Cosgrove does here, especially in his results. First, he raises some interesting questions about what it is we should count as “writing” in the public sphere, more or less suggesting that we ought to be more open to considering a lot of different kinds of writing beyond traditional classroom settings. I think it’s difficult for us within academia to often see what those other kinds of “real world” writing practices might be, so it’s useful to just ask our graduates and let them tell us.
Second, I really like what he has to say about the extent to which we ought to (or really, not) teach specific software, because that’s changing all the time. Rather, “it’s just that the practice we provide our undergraduates should probably be driven more by the texts they are likely to produce than by the software applications that are extant that the moment when they are producing them (326).” I agree 100%, and for me, it means that there isn’t really much point in teaching students how to use a specific piece of software in class like Writing for the World Wide Web or a computer documentation class. Specific software choices shift way too fast, and besides, just because we teach students to use a specific software because it is the “industry standard” doesn’t automatically mean that particular employers will actually use that software, if that makes sense.
And I also agree that students today in writing programs need to think about is actually creating an audience for their writing via blogs and other social network sites. That’s a point that might be coming up in my section of “Writing for the World Wide Web” this term.
As far as “Research Centers as Change Agents: Reshaping Work in Rhetoric and Writing” by Brian Gogan, Kelly Belanger, Ashley Patriarca, and Megan O’Neill goes: I think it’s a reasonably good piece about the history of research centers and how they have contributed to the field. For the most part, this seems to me a history of research centers and sort of a recap of some of the current ones that are in operation and that are tied to writing studies. But I have to say I found my mind wondering in reading this one.
While Buttoning Down for the Groundhog Day Snowopoloza
Three snowy thoughts:
- Extreme snow edition #1: circa 1982/3/4, the middle of Iowa: the worst snow event I can recall happening to me was somewhere in high school. I recall being a part of a high school debate/speech team event where I ended up being stranded for at least a couple of nights with classmates and chaperons in some ridiculously small Iowa town and equally ridiculous small town motel. I remember it was about 8 people to a room, we could only eat at the deli counter at Hy-Vee for some reason, and the David Lynch movie The Elephant Man was on repeatedly on HBO or some such thing.
- Any number of snowy memories/tortures blur together. There were many other storms in Iowa, including a drive back to the University of Iowa from Cedar Falls on quasi-closed interstates with a classmate who I can’t remember: I do recall coming back the Sunday after Thanksgiving only to find the university closed on that Monday. I remember several times in Richmond, VA, where the (comparably modest) snow and/or ice and/or snow ended any sort of normal interaction in the city. There was a terrible storm in Bowling Green that included -20 degree weather, snow like crazy, canceled classes, etc. I am sure there were other such experiences I’m forgetting.
- And now we have this latest event, which is easily the most hyped snow event in recent memory. I’m writing/thinking about this post long before this turns truly ugly, but I have to wonder if it’s possible for any weather event to live up to these expectations. I suppose tomorrow morning will tell.
The failed textbook paying off again
I gave a talk at the Computers and Writing Conference at UC-Davis in 2009 with Nick Carbone about textbooks– my failed project, Nick’s perspective from St. Martin’s, etc.– and one of the things I talked about then was the two kinds of “capital” that comes from publishing. There’s capital as in “money,” and, there is definitely more of that with textbooks than there is with traditional academic publishing. Though one thing that I definitely learned from working on a textbook is that doing it for the money is not a good strategy. If I calculated my earnings based on an hourly wage, I’d say I would have done a lot better financially getting a part-time job at Starbucks.
Anyway, then there’s capital as in “academic credits” of various sorts, usually in the form of a CV entry. As I pointed out in Davis, my talk there about my failed textbook was an example of that, and I’m happy to report two more of these more nebulous and abstract forms of capital. The first is I have a chapter in volume 2 of Writing Spaces called “On the Other Hand: The Role of Antithetical Writing in First Year Composition Courses.” Basically, it’s a revised and repurposed version of a chapter in The Process of Research Writing on the antithesis exercise, which I personally still think is one of the better ideas I had for that book.
The second is a project that is a little more tricky for me to describe on the CV. Out of the blue, I was contacted about the online version of my book from Eleven Learning, which is a tech start-up in Boston (I think) that has a pretty sweet interface for online books. I’m not sure what the future of this operation is likely to be or even what is at stake with them right now, but I think it’s a great idea. Even if I can’t put it on a CV.
I guess the moral of the story is that even “dead” projects can have another life.
On Sheridan’s “Fabricating Consent: Three-Dimensional Objects as Rhetorical Compositions”
I’ve been a bit tardy posting about my scholarly reading because the start of school last week has really kicked me in the butt. Hard. I’ve more or less triple-whammied myself. I took on an administrative assignment: I’m the “Writing Program Coordinator,” which means I deal with our undergrad major and our MA in writing, and while this is something I’ve done before, I still have to get back up to speed and/or figure out what has changed since I did this a couple years ago. I’m teaching an overload this term, which complicates some of the previously mentioned administrative work start-up time. And I wasn’t really as “ready” for the new term last week as I ideally would have liked to have been. The break is never long enough, but with trips to both Florida and Iowa and Annette at MLA for the first week of classes, it was really really not long enough. Oh well.
Anyway, I have actually still been reading about an article a week, and last week’s selection was David Sheridan’s “Fabricating Consent: Three Dimensional Objects as Rhetorical Compositions,” which is in the December issue of Computers and Composition. It’s about the implications of the tools that are coming online for fabricating objects– so-called 3D printers, for example– and how that might be incorporated into composition and rhetoric, and it’s also advocating for a rhetorical exploration of objects.
There’s always the “why would you do this” question– one I’ll bring up again– and I think Sheridan does a really good job of naming the fundamental categories for answers to that question in the field generally, and he goes on to structure his article in response to these questions:
Because it’s possible. (New technologies increasingly allow rhetors to produce visual compositions.)
Because it’s powerful. (Visual rhetoric allows us to communicate more effectively than words alone can.)
Because it’s valued. (Visual rhetoric is valued in the personal, professional, and public spheres that students inhabit.)
Because it’s ours. (Visual rhetoric, is the domain of ordinary rhetors, not just a specialized group of professionals, such as graphic designers.)
These are all the reasons why I see including writing practices that go beyond “words in a row” in different classes– I’m thinking of movies, audio/podcasts, web sites, posters, etc., etc. I have a hard time imagining 3D fabrications along the line of what Sheridan is describing in parts of this article, but that is mainly because I have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of 3D desktop printing, period. But apparently, as Sheridan cites pretty clearly here, affordable 3D “printers” are just around the counter, and I guess in a lot of ways, we’re in the stage now with this stuff that we were 30 years ago with the advent of desktop publishing. I mean, in the late 1970s/early 1980s, the idea that it would be possible to publish a newspaper or a magazine without laying out the physical page– skipping past stuff like the waxed column of print created by the linotype operators, light tables, blue grids, etc.– probably seemed pretty abstract.
Sheridan also gives us a good bibliography in this piece of all kinds of scholars who have written in different ways of how objects have the power to persuade in lots of different ways. In fact, it’s enough stuff there to form the basis of a great “rhetoric of objects” sort of graduate course. If nothing else, I might borrow some of this the next time I teach the Rhetoric of Science and Technology course.
But I think there is still a bit of the question of “why would you do this;” or, perhaps more specifically, “when would you do this?” Sheridan cites Lanham’s essay “The Electronic Word” to get to the issue of “what business are we in,” offers several examples of things sort of like 3D compositions, and he writes:
I could imagine a colleague challenging me in the way that Bruce McComiskey’s colleagues challenge him: You’re a writing teacher! What business is it of yours to teach students to make t-shirts, mugs, lamp shades, and dolls. My reply would echo McComiskey’s: my job is to teach rhetoric, in all its forms, and 3D compositions are compelling rhetorical forms. My training as a teacher and scholar of rhetoric helps me to understand and teach the way compositions like an altered Barbie can function as powerful strategies of persuasion in certain contexts.
(The “altered Barbie” thing is one of the examples he discusses earlier about the Barbie Liberation Organization).
For me, it’s all about contexts and purposes of the class. If I ever get a graduate-level multimedia authoring class off the ground (it’s on the “to do” list), then some discussion about these kinds of 3D “fabs” would very much fit in. As part of our first year writing program at EMU, students generally fabricate things and/or otherwise represent their writing in the kinds of ways that Sheridan talks about here in the “Celebration of Student Writing” that happens toward the end of the Fall and Winter semesters. So I can definitely see it as a part of a writing course.
Having said that, I think that in a class like first year writing at a place like EMU, I would be doing students a great disservice if I spent too much time on learning how to fabricate t-shirts, mugs, lamp shades, dolls, and other 3D compositions, especially if it was at the expense of teaching “words in a row” kinds of writing skills and researching skills. I want to stress “in a class like first year writing at a place like EMU” because we have a lot of students in those classes who are “at risk,” to put it euphemistically. A good number of these students struggle mightily with some very basic, traditional, and unsexy writing skills. So to the extent that first year writing is a “service” course (and I am well aware that that’s debatable), I think we owe it to students to focus first on those arguably boring and traditional elements of a writing course first, and to incorporate other elements of writing (e.g., 3D fabrication, visual rhetoric, audio, etc.) only as it relates to “the basics.”
This is not a position that everyone in the computers and writing world has, but I have always been of the opinion that students need to first have a good handle on “words in a row” literacy before they venture into images, sounds, objects, etc. Or at the very least, the images, sounds, and objects that are incorporated into writing pedagogy for first year students has to serve “words in a row” literacy first. I wrote an essay/commentary back in 2004 called “Yes, But Is It Writing?” that was more or less in response to some stuff I saw at the Computers and Writing conference that year. I remember going to a presentation where the speaker (I have no idea who) was talking about incorporating Flash movies into a first year writing class, and where this speaker showed some of the (frankly, mediocre) work his students did with their movies. As I wrote back then:
I’m not trying to suggest first-year composition courses are or should be just about the so-called basic skills, and, like most of my composition and rhetoric colleagues, I resist the idea that first year composition is a sort of remedial course. But at the same time, being able to “design” a cool looking web site or Flash movie is not the same thing as being able to “write.”
A class that focuses on intensely graphic projects, one where the teacher would inevitably have to devote a great deal of class time to helping students learn and use the multimedia software and hardware, might help students to be “visually sophisticated” and even critical readers of visual mediums like television or film. But it wouldn’t necessarily help student write decent paragraphs and sentences and “essays,” no matter how you define the difficult to define term “essay.”
So the same thing with 3D fabs: best used with moderation, I think.
On Pedersen’s “Negotiating Cultural Identities through Language: Academic English in Jordan”
My second article/review reading in the December 2010 CCC is Anne-Marie Pedersen’s “Negotiating Cultural Identities through Language: Academic English in Jordan.” I should point out at the outset that I haven’t read much of anything on English as a second/non-native/additional language since graduate school, and even then, I didn’t read much. So the general area of Pedersen’s article is largely something I haven’t studied and am not that interested in. Not because it’s not important, of course– it is; it’s just something that hasn’t been much an issue for me in my teaching and in my main scholarly focus.
The first thing I thought about in reading this article is this would be a good one to show to grad students in the fall when I teach English 621, which is our sort of research methods/capstone/get ready to work on your MA project class. Pedersen’s essay is an excellent example of the structure and genre or “research essay” of the sort that a lot of our students do involving subjects: she introduces the problem, explains her methodology and interview subjects, discusses and concludes (while at the same time drawing on lots of relevant scholarship in the field), and she includes a couple appendixes about her research subjects and questions, notes (including reference to IRB), and a works cited. Her project involves 24 subjects, which is quite a bit bigger a project than most of MA students should/would tackle, but it looks to me like this work was the basis of Pedersen’s dissertation.
I also like how Pedersen’s project asks a “manageably-sized” question about English use among a set of scholars in the Arabic world (specifically Jordan). That’s it. She isn’t trying to find the answer to “life, the universe, and everything,” which is a problem I see frequently with MA students, especially when they start their projects. I tell students you don’t want a project that is like a big shaggy wet dog leaving fur and drool and who knows what everywhere; rather, you want a small and well-groomed lap-dog of a project, the kind of dog/project where the reaction is “aww, that’s adorable.” So when I say that Pedersen’s project is like a well-groomed lap-dog, I mean that as a compliment.
Ultimately, she finds that her subjects’ relationships with English are complicated. They rely on English for their scholarship and their teaching, but they value Arabic in their day-to-day lives. English is the language one of her subjects uses for his phone because he had not bothered to learn how to use Arabic on it; it’s the language another subject uses to communicate with their Philippine (sp??) nanny because she doesn’t speak Arabic, and it’s the language of the TV shows this subject’s kids watch; and it is the language another subject uses to write things that are somehow politically charged. So on the one hand, English is problematically hegemonic; on the other hand, it is simply the common and accepted language of scientific discourse.
There are only two issues/questions I have about all this. First, I wonder what the results would be had Pedersen studied language use among scientists or academics in a country that had not had some sort of English colonial history. I am not sure that English is as necessary or empowering among scholars in places like Russia, France, or Brazil, for example. Second, she’s talking specifically about science here. I heard on the radio the other day about a site called Three Percent, the amount (evidently) of the literature written not in English that is ultimately translated into English. In other words, I can see why it would be critical for scientists participating in an international discourse to know and use English, but I’ll bet you there are plenty of Jordanian and other Arabic poets and fiction writers who are quite successfully practicing their art without English.