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).