Student Metacognition after Fieldwork

The Student as the Flâneur

My Rhet-Comp 1301 students are expected to practice local rhetorical awareness, local literacy descriptions. Without explaining the idea of the flâneur, I argue that students practice kinesthetic awareness within the space, seeing the difference of place vs. space. Lot of theory behind that, and we attention the practice without all that background. 

We start with Victor Villanueva's awareness of his neighborhood in Brooklyn decades ago and how the neighborhoods today are dissimilar and similar. That's another discussion, too -- the change of cities, sprawl, late-capitalism, and more. Villanueva describes the literacies (plural; see New Literacy Studies) in a mixed-ethnic lower-working-class neighborhood, and I argue that many of these neighborhoods mirror my college's communities. Like Villanueva, I argue that the college does not know the community, and students become the specialist of their community's literacies through fieldwork. 

Students are instructed to spend walking for 2-4 hours in their communities, paying attention to those literacies: music, posters, signs, graffiti, flyers and newspapers, oral literacies and visual literacies. Not surprising, most students have never been asked to do any fieldwork, especially for a writing course. And, not surprising in a working class environment, many students experience very busy lives and haven't taken the leisure to literally walk in their own communities. They often drive through, but actually experience their bodies in the streets and look how
businesses, religious spaces, state (police, for example) texts, and private literacies. Students then write to describe and explain a themed literacy, synthesizing learning from Villanueva and additional sources. 

After students have submitted their writing project, I ask students to reflect on their writing process and how the writing process influenced their learning. After reflecting, the whole class discusses their comments and we discuss. Below is one whiteboard discussion, with forever apologies for my penmanship:

To be clear, the students were confused with the original assignment: getting out of the classroom, going into their communities, walking and describing and photographing. Most students had never expected to learn from a source except from the classroom and the control of the classroom: a teacher, a textbook, a test. But at the core of critical consciousness is to ask students to understand their world and their world isn't constrained by a small classroom with partial discourses controlled by the professor. I also feel (is this ageist? do I belie my generational biases?) that students have become too attuned to safe spaces such as their homes, without understand how the world is messy, complex, and always a negotiation of multiple discourses outside the mass corporate communication. In other words, the assignment expects students to reverse the flow of information and knowledges from the comfort zone and into more challenging and changing discourses that are really impacting our development.

But notice what the students are seeing: the flâneur exercise forces the student to reexamine their assumptions of literacies or to examine their literacies as a source of knowledge. Instead of expecting the epistemology coming from only the professor, the student needs to create their own epistemology from the ground or from the street, and bring this observations into the classroom.

My community college service area is rather large. I know some colleges represent multiple counties and I see urban colleges with another perspective. But the urban communities create new problems of largeness: some students do not have transportation or unreliable transportation and our city does not provide a good public transportation service for most of my students. This means that even though they live only 10 miles away, some students may struggle to get to the college campus. Even with transportation, the congestion, poor design and poor maintenance, stop lights and railroad interference makes conveniences of driving another form of largeness. This largeness means that even the students may live within 10 miles from each other, they often never visit other communities. Specifically, most students living in Spring have never been to la pulga in Aldine; many students from Greenspoint have never been to Old Town Spring (you're not missing anything). The flâneur exercise provides the students to bring new knowledge of our neighbors into a classroom, struggle to explain what the communities experience, and transfer this struggle into writing.

We need more fieldwork, especially in rhetoric courses. As a community college, professors should practice flâneur in the students' communities and stop pretend what students' lives are like. Villanueva also criticizes teachers who work in a community but live outside a community and the disparity of literacies can be shocking.