Saturday, August 27, 2005

Kinaesthetics, Intensive Gatherings and Bodily Arts

The body itself becomes a sundromos, an intensive gathering of forces (of desire, of vigorous practices, of musical sounds, of corporeal codes), trafficked through and by neurons, muscles and organs.  Entwined with the body in this way, rhetorical training thus exceeds the transmission of 'ideas,' rhetoric the bounds of 'words.' (Hawhee 160)

Yesterday I attended a Writing Program mini-seminar on the relationship between the writing center and athletics and the presence of student-athletes in writing courses. As a part of ongoing professional development, most writing teachers at SU attend two mini-seminars each semester.  The speaker--a graduate student in rhetoric at Arizona--brought many insights; he's been instrumental in launching a satellite writing center in the athletic department at UofA, and so the four-hour session was aptly named "Home Turf: Defining Access and Success for College Student-Athletes."  Early on, the conversation hinged on the spatial quality of athletic performance; for pre-reading, we looked at Hawhee's "Bodily Pedagogies: Rhetoric, Athletics, and the Sophists' Three Rs," from College English, Andrew Zimbalist's chapter "The Student as Athlete" from Unpaid Professionals, Wilfred Bailey's "Summary: Time Constraints, Or Why Most College Athletes Cannot Also Be Students," (College Sports, Inc.) and a few articles from ESPN.com on whistle-blowers. We also talked through perceptions of student-athlete privilege, so-called "problematic sports" of men's basketball and football (with no direct justification for crediting this commonplace to any particular institution, much less SU), and part-time faculty bearing added labor because of support measures (email check-ins from coaches, mid-semester progress reports, etc.) initiated from athletics.

I was generally in agreement with the speaker's take on several of these complicated problems, and I would like for these notes to reflect such a stance, as well as to support efforts at broader recognitions of the false and damaging commonplaces circulated about student-athletes--athletics as anti-intellectual, a contradiction to scholarly rigor, a kind of unfortunate burden on the institution's already-burdened, or a merely exploitative money-maker.  If anything is clear from yesterday's talk, it's that institutional situations are vastly different from region to region and from one governance level to another (NCAA, NAIA, DI-DIII, etc). Generalizations about student-athletes or athletics departments circulate with great frequency, but many of them plainly don't hold up here or there.

Kinesthetic literacy--or a kind of bodily/performative intelligence--came up early in the talk, but with twenty-five of us in attendance and so much conversation, we didn't have adequate chance to develop this line of thought.  Judging only by her article (I haven't read Bodily Arts yet), Hawhee's stuff, which examines the overlaps between the bodily and the rhetorical arts in the classical tradition, leads us to a question:  how might composition embrace kinesthetic literacy?  How might writing pedagogies account for the kinesthetic?  Citing Sirc's work on Pollock, she explains the approach of composition as "inhabiting, an immersive approach wherein the lines between (and definitions of) artist and work become less clear" (159).  It's a difficult question to answer, but I appreciate that Friday's speaker brought it up through references to Hawhee and (in turn) Sirc.

More from Hawhee:

"As locations of physical training--young boys learned and practiced running, jumping, wrestling, and boxing, for starters--the gymnasia were already important sites for the production of citizen subjects, and moreover, the production took place in a decidedly corporeal style.  From this spatial intermingling of practices there emerged a curious syncretism between athletics and rhetoric, a particular crossover in pedagogical practices and learning styles, a crossover that contributed to the development of rhetoric as a bodily art: an art learned, practiced, and performed by and with the body as well as the mind". (144)

I'm still thinking about two other issues from the session.  The first (-1-) concerns the idea that athletics departments take on attitudes of eligibility maintenance rather than embracing a spirit of intellectual rigor and excellence.  I'm snagged on excellence (and no, I haven't read Readings' U. in Ruins...all second-hand knowledge of it).  Here too, athletic programs involve a mix; it's knotted--the need-a-C-to-be-eligible power forward sits in class alongside the straight-As setter.  So maybe there is an ethic of grade survival (yeah, something like that), but it doesn't mean that anyone (coach, AD, etc.) in an athletic program wouldn't prefer to hold up a 3.9 average GPA for a program (rather than 2.4, say).  Still, it'd help to situationalize this...name names, point to this program or that one.

The second issue (-2-) concerns a paradox: the incommensurability of institutionally enforced amateurism and, on the other hand, what was yesterday called "infantilizing" support systems.  I'm leaving out a lot of details, but the discussion brought out a few concerns about emails to instructors (inquiring about class status or grades) and attendance-checkers as being anti-responsibility and an interference with self-advocacy.  And yet, that roles are systematically defined in such a way that student-athletes are subject to a kind of forced amateurism--rule-fixed laborers--justifies the related supports and insurances.  Yet more knotty stuff, but I was interested in the questions surrounding this issue: how do we learn to advocate for ourselves?  how does agency form and from where or under what conditions?  Notably, at least a few of the anecdotes shared during the session suggested instructor discomfort in the student-athlete's more nurturant network.  In other words, with student-athletes our primacy as (caring writing) instructors is set in tension with this other unfamiliar (except in myth) institutional force--coaches who may be the student-athlete's most trusted ally in the university system and related academic support staff who attempt (often with resulting consternation) to act as an intermediary wedge between the student-athlete and unkind/unaccommodating (or so-perceived) academic policies.

A few other reading notes from "Bodily Pedagogies":

Rhythm, repetition and response (145)

"the wrestler will acquire a bodily rhythm that enables a forgetting of directives." (149)

"What Isocrates articulates here is a pedagogy of association--a cultivation of habits and practices by placing oneself in relation to those who practice the arts one is pursuing; these arts were named earlier in the treatises as horsemanship, athletics, hunting, and philosophy, or study of discourse ([Isocrates] 45)" (153).

"In other words, the 'end result' of such a pedagogy is not a finished product, but a dispositional capacity for iteration--the ability to continually repeat, transform, and respond" (155).

Posted by Derek Mueller at August 27, 2005 9:00 PM to Sport