PaStIcHe: examining remixing

"How can we teach, engage in research, write about, and talk across boundaries with others, instead of for, about and around them?" (620).
Jacqueline Jones Royster "When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own."

Indeed.

Enter: “Datacloud: The Remix”

In our own scholarship:

[Remix: we might also think of coding data as a form of remixing? We read, stuff ‘emerges’ – emergence though is based on our interpretative lens, our framework-- and where does our interpretative lens come from? the voices in our heads—old mentors, fellow scholars to whom we speak, and of whom we read, those whose approval we seek. We code, stuff emerges. Whose stuff is it? Letting the data speak for itself…sure, but then we act as interpreters of that voice, we always necessarily select what we will attune to. And in that selection, our interpretative lens is evidenced.]

In our teaching:
"at least one set of social forces suggests to students that using citations and quotations from source materials will be valued less than their own original text, a situation that may encourage them to conceal their sources." (p. 378)
[Really? I spend a lot of time *encouraging* students to use sources! Our students often aren't granted the authority to speak for themselves-- they're expected to use sources because their voices aren't always trusted to speak *correctly* on their own! Elbow, ok, maybe he’s a little passé, but he has a place here in any discussion of voice, which is what’s going on in one level in this text. Johnson-Eilola & Selber are reframing students’ voices like Bakhtin’s heteroglossia.]

"students are encouraged to make explicit their borrowings and appropriations. What counts, in this new context, is the ability of students to remix texts in ways that address specific issues, readers, and situations." (p. 380)
[They're arguing for a shift from Invention to Arrangement and Delivery. They're not calling it that explicitly but that's what it is. It’s more than a shift though, it’s perhaps more accurately a reappropriation. Arrangement and Delivery are taking ownership of Invention? Or vice versa?]

" What if the “final” product a student produces—a text—is not concerned with original words or images on a page or screen but concerned primarily with assemblages of parts?" (p. 380)
[this sounds a lot like factory production language though, this is where I’m getting into trouble. Is this again a lack of trust? Are our own students’ personal narratives still valued? Are we telling them we don’t want to hear your stories? Or is my problem here in how I’m defining stories? We don’t want to hear your old stories, you’ve got to make new stories and you need to recognize that they come from outside of you?]

"patch-writing"
[like topoi a little. also like progymnastata, modeling- Graff & Birkenstein They Say I Say - They're arguing for writing as problem-solving.]

" A traditional approach in composition would create at least two hierarchical levels of value among these materials: The quotations, links, and default elements of the template would be valued less than the original text (original images, personal narrative, and summaries). After all, one might say, the other materials were all pre-existing: Johndan merely found them." (p. 390)

[Invention as discovery, so they're situating invention as problem-solving within invention as creative act. Is there room here for recognition of individual subjectivities? Yes, I think so, as long as the students are encouraged to explain their choices, their juxtapositions. But again, I'm running in circles, because that would also reinforce Johnson-Eilola & Selber's claims that we value the original text more than the texts students bring in. -- this would be a means of forcing them to generate original texts. Is there a way out of the loop?]