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CONCLUSION
At the end of the day there are at least four things that I know for sure about these student-athletes’ literacy practices based on the data from this study. These primary findings allow me to state that (1) these student-athletes’ training methods influenced their literacy, (2) student-athletes have highly sophisticated literacy that reflects their highly sophisticated cognition, and (3) these student-athletes liked their training regimens. The fourth finding can be split into thirds based on the three themes organizing the data of the study. And, each of these attests to the highly physical nature of these student-athletes’ academic and athletic training; they also indicate the extent to which reading-writing was infused in this training.
Repetition, Surveillance and Breakdown as Key FindingsEach of the three themes represents concepts that have pedagogical implications for literacy and learning. The first theme, Repetition, is not a rote, skill and drill activity. Basic critical cognitive elements are habituated through repetitive performance. In fact, for these student-athletes, repetition was performance. It is for this reason that Repetition does not suggest a pedagogy of skill and drill for Compositionists and Literacy practitioners. Traditional skill and drill, or rote, exercises are defined by mindlessness. No matter how basic or minute, each drill was a part of both an immediate and an eventual, contextualized performance where the players were either imagining or acting within a larger performance.
“Sense of urgency” is a concept that doesn’t receive much attention in the chapters above. But a sense of urgency pervaded much of what they did in their athletic training. The players talked about “sense of urgency” and this sense was embodied in their dedication and in their actions. Despite the fact that the players received little if any pleasure from practice and games, they maintained their devotion to their regimen. They maintained their dedication to something larger than themselves – The Team. Repetition had this sense of urgency because there were very real consequences for the players’ performances as individuals and as a team. Their performances were evaluated in practices and in games. And how they performed – whether it was in drills in practice or during the heat of a game – impacted them in terms of the rewards of a day off from practice or the punishment of a three hour practice to further drill the appropriate performative elements that were viewed by the coaches as deficient. So, shooting 200 jump shots was not necessarily viewed by these players as “repetition” but as a performative element of a larger collection that makes up the game of basketball. Shooting 200 jump shots is a core part of the game. Such drills are inseparable from the game itself.
To a lesser degree, this translated into their educational domain as well. And it likely translated more as a result of their ways of being as athletes than it did because of a deep sense of urgency for academics. Tests, quizzes, papers, speeches were “contests” they had to perform well on because there were athletic consequences from Coach if they didn’t. But even then the stakes weren’t as high in the academic domain as it was in the athletic domain. This can be attributed, again, to their dedication to something larger than themselves in the domain of athletics. In their academics the effects of their training was limited almost exclusively to themselves. But still they “got their reps” by studying their vocabulary or repeatedly reviewing study guides as a matter of their habits of training. Such was their concept of how to train in both the academic and athletic domains.
Surveillance, the second theme, is not simply Coach’s invigilation of the players’ every move. I call it an educational technology because the method had an impact on their learning. Surveillance instilled positive literacy habits and a sense of value for the prescribed training methods of the Discourse community. At the heart of this educational technology was literacy. Texts were instruments of surveillance. And the reading-writing of the players was shaped by surveillance. Surveillance, then, was not simply a theme. Just as Foster promoted the value of Surveillance for the positive effects it had on the educational and athletic success of the black female athletes in his study, I too attribute a number of benefits to Surveillance. Among those benefits were the installation of positive literacy habits, a positive and lasting training method that crossed the domains of academics and athletics, and a 100% eligibility rate. The discipline that Surveillance instilled cannot be overstated, and value that these players came to have for their acquired methods of training should not be undervalued. Both were the direct result of Surveillance. Despite some of the drawbacks of Surveillance, overall this educational technology was a net gain for these players.
The final major theme, Breakdown, is also one of the major findings of this study. That is, Breakdown is not simply one of the organizing themes for this study but it is an educational technology that reveals these student-athletes’ highly physical method of training. This is a significant finding because it demonstrates an effective bodily system for coming to know content. The Breakdown method exhibited by these players illuminates how body and mind work syncretically in literacy and learning in the semiotic domains of both basketball and school. As a whole, the principles of Breakdown in action reveal how at nearly every turn the method of learning is a bodily endeavor. The highly physical nature manifests in the principles of Breakdown as the players first see the whole; they then reduce constituent part or actions as they physically separate actions from the whole; there is physical doing in the performance of the content and in the performance of their repetitions; feedback circulates throughout via the physical acts of speaking and hearing, talking and listening; finally, there is the physical reassembly, or buildup, of the parts back into a unified performance of the material. The physicality of Breakdown was highly visible and quite clear in the domain of athletics, but we saw it also in such examples as Charles’ use of the note cards. These student-athletes relied primarily on their bodily ways of being as an integral part of their literacy practices.
In chapters three, four and five Repetition, Surveillance and Breakdown served as themes that helped organize the presentation of the data. I revisit these concepts here, in the conclusion, to be explicit about the fact that these concepts also represent key findings. That is, Repetition, Surveillance and Breakdown further illustrate and give depth to two of the things I can say for certain about what we know from these players: (1) their training methods impacted their literacy practices and (2) the highly sophisticated nature of these student-athletes’ literacy in turn reflects their highly sophisticated cognition.
Student-athletes’ Training Methods Influence Their Literacy Basketball was these student-athletes’ way of being; it was at the core of their identities. They were at the same time always both student and athlete. As such, their ways of being were not confined by domains. So their training methods and their values for a hard work ethic and their regimented processes, all of which were tied to literacy, impacted their literacy practices in all three domains. These players trained by using Repetition; they trained by Breakdown. Repetition and Breakdown affected how they read-wrote. To separate these players’ training practices from their literacy practices would be as unnatural as separating body from mind. If you were to imagine an image of a double helix, with two strands interweaving one with the other to make an image of a single object, such would be the image of their literacy and training practices.
Student-athletes Have Highly Sophisticated Literacy that Reflects Their Highly Sophisticated Cognition In case I haven’t stated it clearly enough elsewhere: These student-athletes revealed highly sophisticated and complex literacy practices. Their sophisticated and complex ways of interacting with, making sense of, and bringing texts to life in their performances (i.e. their demonstrated understanding of the content) demonstrate sophisticated thinking and highly developed cognitive processing of their respective texts. Will’s discussion of how the scout team can so quickly and competently memorize and perform opposing teams’ play books is one vivid example of this sophistication. Another example of the complexity of their literacy and their sophistication emerged within the system of Surveillance. Surveillance made it necessary for the players to develop subversive behaviors that allowed them to be social and take advantage of the know-how of their peers. This was demonstrated in study halls when the players would collaborate under the radar of the coaches’ gazes and on the basketball court when they would undermine the rules of the drills such as when Mario didn’t steal the ball from his teammate. Mario was an example of how these players recognized the nuances of texts, processed them with an understanding of the consequences of their actions and consciously made decisions based on their knowledge of the rules and values of the respective domain in which the text + performance was situated. Each of these is representative of the complexity of these student-athletes’ reading, writing and thinking.
These Student-athletes Valued Their Training Regimens These players were constantly doing things they didn’t want to do. They were constantly engaging in physically, mentally and emotionally demanding activities. The coaches demanded a lot from these student-athletes, and the players always found it within themselves to respond. Why would a group of teenagers and young 20-somethings willingly do difficult, joyless work? There are at least three reasons. First, they valued the work they were doing. More importantly, they valued how they were doing the work – i.e. the training methods. The players most often articulated this in relation to study hall. They didn’t enjoy study hall, but they valued it. Second, to slack off or to do less than their individual best was not only detrimental to the individual, but a half-hearted effort negatively impacted their friends and Teammates. These student-athletes were deeply committed to something greater than themselves, The Team. And the concept of the Team as being greater than any one individual was something the players held close to their heart. I’d suggest that this, too, was a part of their ways of being, their individual identities. This brings me to the third motivating reason: identity. Being a student-athlete, specifically, being a basketball player, was what these guys were; it’s how they defined themselves in all of their domains. In their social, academic and athletic worlds these guys were basketball players. Unless they quit, they could never not be basketball players. And when a player did quit, he was effectively ostracized. A crucial part of being a member of The Team meant acquiescing to and accepting specific values, ways of being, codes of behavior. It also meant acquiescing to and valuing the training regimens. These three reasons are what made the difficult, joyless work meaningful to these student-athletes. Having a positive work ethic, achieving goals, competing to be the best they could be as a team and as individuals – all of these reasons explain how and why these subjects could commit with such vigor to the things they did.
Contribution to English Composition and Literacy Education In this final section I take a somewhat personal approach to explaining the contributions of this study to the field. Weaving through this final discussion are statements about pedagogy and literacy learning that this study allows me to state with a high degree of certainty. I mentioned in the introduction that during the course of conducting the research for this study I began to turn my scholarly attention more towards K-12 literature. I explained that one of the motivations for this shift was due to my perceptions of the inherently more practical, less abstract nature of K-12 education literature. One of the effects of my immersion in this literature was that it merged with what I was learning from the subjects of my study. The result was that I began to apply the two to the construction of an innovative vocabulary curriculum targeted at Pre-K – 12th grade students. The name of the curriculum I have developed is Meta-threads®, “Smart clothes for smart kids.”
Meta-threads is an educational curriculum and clothing line. At the moment there are three separate editions: (1) toddler line, (2) anatomy line, (3) advanced vocabulary line. Each edition has developmentally appropriate content incorporated onto the garments. First I’ll describe Meta-threads, then I’ll explain the connections to this study. Meta-threads are designed to be wearer-centric – i.e. “kid-centered.” So, for example, all of the words printed on the shirts are upside-down so the person wearing it can read it right-side up. For the toddlers there are blue shirts with the word “blue” printed on the front. As well, on the inside, on the bottom of the shirt, also printed upside-down so the wearer can read it, the word “blue” is used in a sentence. The words used for the toddler line are age-appropriate and are based in part on such sight word lists as the Dolch Word List. For the advanced vocabulary line, which are primarily targeted at 9th-12th grade students, the words increase in difficulty. An example of a word that would appear in the advanced vocabulary curriculum is “permeate.” The word would, again, be printed upside-down. And, like the toddler line, would have the word “permeate” used in a sample sentence to demonstrate correct usage. On the advanced line, however, there is also a definition included. So, the inside bottom of the shirt would read: “v. to diffuse through or penetrate (something); to pass through the pores or interstices of. ‘The stench of sweaty socks permeated the air of the boys locker room.’” An example of a shirt from the anatomy line is the clavicle shirt. The word “clavicle” is printed on the collar bone of the shirt. This identifies the appropriate anatomical part of the body to the wearer and those around her. There are “deltoid” shirts, “sternum” shirts, “pectoral,” “oblique” and so on.
The Meta-threads curriculum is created for individual wearers, but the objective is to have them incorporated by the dozens so that they can circulate throughout a milieu as a way of heightening “word consciousness,” to “teach individual words” and to help provide “rich and varied language experiences” for all the students in the school or class. Michael Graves has written that there are four essential strategies for teaching vocabulary effectively: providing rich and varied language experiences; teaching individual words; teaching word-learning strategies; and fostering word consciousness (Graves 4-8). Meta-threads implements all four of these strategies. One of the most important, though, is heightening word consciousness. By having scores of different words circulating throughout a school, throughout the day, and beyond the walls of language arts classrooms, word consciousness is heightened in a more efficient manner than traditional content delivery. This is accomplished by putting the words on the students’ bodies. It is estimated by Nagy and Anderson (quoted in Winters, 685) that the average fifth grader will be exposed to approximately 10,000 words during the fifth grade alone. It is nearly impossible for a teacher to teach each of these words. Therefore, Meta-threads can supplement the vocabulary curriculum by providing words that teachers are unlikely or unable to cover. Heightening word consciousness, along with providing word learning strategies through explicit lessons on prefixes, suffixes and roots, provides students and kids with the power to figure out new words, to self-teach.
How exactly does this relate to my research on student-athletes’ literacy practices? The most important way that Meta-threads is connected is through the body. Meta-threads puts the vocabulary on the students’ bodies. The lesson plans include highly physical interactions and activities – events with lots of performance, gesturing, movement.
Second, many of the principles from the findings of my research manifest in the Meta-threads curriculum – especially Repetition and Breakdown. The objective with Meta-threads is to get kids and adults to interact frequently and in natural exchanges (i.e. feedback). Such exchanges encourage the student to use the word (i.e. performance). By discussing the words that are describing the very clothes on which the word-lessons are printed Meta-threads facilitates both of these things. Here the principles of Feedback and Performance (from Breakdown) are consciously channeled. The design feature makes the word accessible and convenient for the child wearing the clothes so they and their peers can view their word easily and use it repeatedly. Student interaction is encouraged because the words are clearer to the wearer than they are to others, so when adults or peers ask one another what their shirts say/mean the performative nature of these exchanges increases the likelihood of appropriation through repeated performances of individual words.
The Meta-threads curriculum is designed to have scores of words circulating throughout an environment. In addition to the other objectives, the idea here is to flood the habitus with rich and varied language to demonstrate how a teacher or school or parent values vocabulary building and language play. In theory, Meta-threads would instill in students a similar value for vocabulary, for language play and language exploration. And this is accomplished by incorporating it onto the body. Just as certain norms and values were instilled in the student-athletes by way of modeling (i.e. hexis of individual actors), so too does Meta-threads silently model values and desired norms.
Another crucial feature that borrows from the training methods of the student-athletes is that Meta-threads breaks down and blurs domains. The shirts are worn throughout the day and the language or vocabulary lessons on the shirt are with the wearers whether they are on the bus to school, eating lunch in the cafeteria or discussing the Civil War in a history class. The literacy event travels with them across academic, social and other domains. The student-athletes’ basketball literacy practices traveled across domains, which is one of the reasons their training was so effectively ingrained.
Finally, I would be remiss if I wasn’t explicit about the fact that Meta-threads are a text; Meta-threads are circulating literacy events. The shirts are designed to be read, written about and, especially, talked about. Meta-threads is explicit about how it combines literacy and physicality by putting words and lessons on students’ bodies so that they can, at best, repeatedly perform the content or, at the very least, be silently immersed in literacy events and vocabulary lessons.
Part of the Meta-threads curriculum still being developed includes bracelets and temporary tattoos. I’ve created a curriculum that is based on and revolves entirely around the body. Putting words on students’ bodies and immersing them in language by having their senses constantly exposed to words and word-based interactions seems pedagogically sound. At least it does to me, an educator convinced of the knowledge-making power of the body. Am I too much imposing on the practical, concrete research of K-12 the abstractions and philosophical texts with which the research for this study began? For example, always on my mind, engraved onto my skull, has been a single passage from French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “I am the absolute source…for I alone bring into being for myself…the tradition which I elect to carry on, or the horizon whose distance from me would be abolished…if I were not there to scan it with my gaze” (Merleau-Ponty ix). From his lengthy treatise on phenomenology Merleau-Ponty is talking of the sense-perceiving body. We know the world through our experiences as sense-perceiving subjects. It is with our bodies that we have consciousness. Our being in the world is not mediated by our senses; we know with our senses, because of our bodily senses, our physical-ness. I always turn back to the sense-perceiving body. Filling students’ horizons with vocabulary or anatomy lessons necessarily fills their gazes. Of course they can elect to not carry on or take in the particular lessons, but increasingly, that would be a challenging task for them if they are surrounded by these words. The Merleau-Ponty passage may have less relevance in support of Meta-threads than it does for its relevance as an influence on me and how I’ve thought these past few years about a body-centric consciousness and about highly physical literacy pedagogy. In line with my body-centric consciousness are activities where students can apply to their bodies temporary tattoos with vocabulary. This literate activity is a flurry of sensory excitation.
The student-athletes of this study had highly physical methods of reading, composing, knowing. For me, an approach to literacy education such as Meta-threads is logical because it makes language learning physical. Clearly we cannot have our students running sprints or doing push-ups or shooting hoops in a classroom. But we can make concerted efforts at reconnecting the body to the mind. There are ways to include and even value the body. In fact, though it’s often neglected and undervalued, the body is already a central part of our students’ training. I’ve cited Shaughnessy and Emig and Pearl and others who have argued likewise. I have alluded to Bakhtin’s notion of appropriation. Both implicitly and explicitly, these theorists argue that physically performing material – even in the smallest, most subtle ways such as manipulating pen and paper – are integral to literacy and language learning. Whether it’s hearing new sounds with one’s own ears or tracing new letters with one’s own hand or attempting to annunciate a new word with one’s own tongue, lips and mouth – language and literacy happen syncretically.
Like I said, this is a personal interpretation of the contribution that this study makes to Literacy Studies and Composition. To speak in broader terms, this study highlights a very physical method of training. A highly physical method of literacy training was illustrated by the Surveillance technology and in the Breakdown technology. The way the players socio-physically interacted in study halls also offers a window into how literacy training can mind the body more. Perhaps exploring team-like pods or cells for students could replicate the type of social bonding and group dedication exhibited by these players. In some places there are models for this already, where students enter as a horde and take the same block of classes and share a common advising or mentoring team.
What I Have Learned About Teaching One of the things this study taught me about teaching, or, rather, what it has reminded me about teaching, is that there needs to be a sense of urgency with each lesson I present and an increased level of demand put on my students. Somewhere in between the end of my first years of teaching underprepared students from inner city Chicago and in the midst of writing up this study I lost that sense of urgency. On a daily basis Al, Brittany and Devon, the Chicago students whose passions and needs motivated me to pursue this line of work, would impress upon me the importance of being able to translate their home dialects into mainstream dialect. They needed help with the basics of the English language. They demanded from me. It was the most inspirational experience I’ve had as a teacher. In the process of pursuing a Ph.D. I lost touch with the Al’s, Brittany’s and Devon’s in our schools. And for various complicated reasons that I won’t go into here, my teaching grew increasingly uninspired. As I reflect on what this study has taught me about teaching I keep coming back to two things: (1) Al, Brittany and Devon and (2) the sense of urgency with which the players and coaches of this study functioned. Both groups trained, or wanted to train, as if their lives depended on it. Al, Brittany and Devon believed that they could not achieve high levels of success in a predominantly white corporate world or justice system (their respective career goals) unless they had the white man’s tools – i.e. standardized English vernacular. We would have vigorous conversations about this, especially when I would try to teach the value of a Students’ Right to Their Own Language. The coaches’ and players’ worlds revolved around winning and losing. An accumulation of too many loses, in the world of competitive NCAA sports especially, means death – not a literal death, but, for the coaches it could mean getting fired or for the players it could mean getting kicked off the team (such as the seven players from the season before I began this study who were dismissed because they didn’t produce enough wins). Both of these groups trained with a sense of urgency that you imagine in life and death struggles. Because, in very real ways, how each of these two groups performed directly impacted their existence in society.
I used to believe that my work as a literacy and language educator, and what I did in my classrooms over the course of a semester, had important consequences for the lives of the students in my classes and, indeed, consequences for our society. I believe that still. But apparently my belief is not self-sustaining, because I think what I’ve learned about my teaching is that I need, that I thrive off of, students who have a sense of urgency for how they train. I think what I’ve realized is that I need students with a sense of urgency, students who recognize – whether they can articulate it or not – that what they’re doing has consequences for themselves and for something larger than themselves. It should not be overlooked that the habitus for each of these two groups played an important role in instilling this sense of urgency. The program that Al, Brittany, Devon and myself were a part of had an extensive interviewing process and an elaborate set of rules, standards and support mechanisms that didn’t just state the importance of the program, but enacted that importance. In this way, the habitus sponsored and supported a sense of urgency.
But to return to the students (and players), they, the students, have a responsibility for making a good teacher (or coach). Hawhee talks about this quality in her chapter on “Phusiopoiesis: The Arts of Training” (86-108). “Indeed,” she says, “phusiopoietic practices depend on dynamics of submission and seduction that manifest themselves in a number of ways” (93). Elsewhere she explains that “a major requirement for transformation is the ‘seeking out’ motivated by a desire to cultivate strategies that will produce oneself differently. Such a seeking is, however, accompanied by a concomitant submitting: active submission is thus a necessary first step for transformation” (87). The student-athletes of this study and my students Al, Brittany and Devon all share this phusiopoietic characteristic. A teacher or coach can only expect a response to their demands to the degree that her students/players are willing to submit. To state it another way, students are as responsible for their transformation as are the educators. I won’t generalize to say that this is a neglected consideration within education systems. As well, there are other factors that do well or ill to influence both phusiopoiesis and a sense of urgency. It would be an oversimplification to suggest that either of the two characteristics emerge independently and without some influencing or sponsoring agent. I shall stop here and simply say that what I’ve learned about my teaching, or what I have been reminded of, is that a sense of urgency and at least a small bit of phusiopoiesis are necessary for transformative experiences. And this is equally true regardless of the domain in which the training is taking place.
There are a few other lessons I have learned, such as my realization from observing K-12 teachers and reading K-12 literature of how technical good teaching can be, but those lessons will have to mature elsewhere, in later conversations.
Research: What’s To Follow? These student-athletes’ training has many aspects that need to be further explored in more detail. The one that stands out the most about their training is their dedication and desire to train so intensely. A reader recently posed a question to me about the relationship between pleasure and training. It went something like this: “How might the field learn from these subjects’ pleasure to train?” Imagine the shock when I explained, “There was no pleasure.” These guys didn’t enjoy what they were doing. They did not think of their basketball training as fun. And even the games – the events for which they trained – were relatively joyless. Don’t get me wrong, a few of the guys enjoyed basketball. But the majority of them expressed being burned out physically, mentally and/or emotionally before the season had even ended.
This, to me, is an interesting issue to consider, one for which I have no simple or ready answer. I could speculate about how being a basketball player is a core tenant of their identities, or I might be able to suggest that basketball is so thoroughly a way of being in the world for these student-athletes that they can barely imagine any other way of operating. But these and other conjectures are insufficient. What is the payoff? Why did these players, why do these players, invest so much intensity and vigor in things that do not bring them pleasure? Or at least not very much pleasure? Granted, I did not pose this question to them. But I suspect that even if I had their responses would have inspired more curiosity. I think there is something fulfilling about the challenges they faced and overcame (with varying degrees of success). And, of course, “joy” and “pleasure” can be defined so many different ways. What looks like pleasure to me may not be the same as Will’s or Charles’ or Mario’s versions. Perhaps they were pleasure-filled and I simply did not recognize it.
I think my interest in this idea of pleasure vis-à-vis intensely challenging training is related to motivation: how do we inspire students or student-athletes or whoever to train and study with the intensity of these subjects? Are the factors larger than any one teacher or coach? That is, does motivation come more from our contexts, from habitus, than from individuals? Is it possible to recreate the factors and characteristics displayed by Al, Brittany, Devon and these players? What are the costs? I suspect there are yet unseen answers to such questions in my own data.
Labels: conclusion, diss., Ph.D.
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