“The lily flower against the law”: Digital Almanacs and Mundane Rhetoric in the FYC Classroom

I imagine the potential for a course in which students are able to pit “the lily flower against the law” (Buell 464). To accomplish my goal, I plan to “remix” some of the civic engagement projects listed at sciStarter.com. For example, scistarter.com describes the project “iSeeChange: The Almanac” as follows:

Founded in April 2012 in Western Colorado, iSeeChange is a public radio and media experiment that fosters multimedia conversations between citizens and scientists about how seasonal weather and climate extremes affect daily American life. From the earliest spring recorded in the history of the United States, a landmark wildfire season, nationwide droughts, and weather records breaking everyday, climate affects every citizen and binds communities together. (Par 2)

The project is mediated through a website that hosts an almanac in the form of a blog. Similar to a codex almanac, iSeeChange.com is organized according to seasons and then subdivided into months, weeks, and days.  Each day, community members (citizen scientists) post pictures and/or short written commentary of local animals, plants, precipitation, fire damage, and bugs. The site is designed to collect data on climate change and ways that change effects human, animal, and plant life. Further, if members have questions, the site organizers will find a scientist to answer them. But more than just providing expert responses to non-expert questions, the site seems designed to facilitate a conversation about climate, place, and the local among its members. In this regard the iSeeChange.com project and the civically engaged composition classroom expect similar outcomes: both engage communities in real world writing that is facilitated via digital technology.

I imagine the almanac as the data collection portion of a larger, stepped student hypertext project centered on animal studies and ecology. After articulating and defining the perimeters of their “locales” in a short written argument, students will post pictures, videos, and/or written descriptions of local places and things, according to the seasons and the calendar. After rhetorical analysis of almanacs, some from the MARBL archives, students will write about and document nature in their own digital almanacs from a first person point of view. Like the iSeeChange.com project, a digital almanac project in a first year composition course can go beyond writing about the self and writing about nature in isolation to a “site from which to develop a progressive pedagogical and political practice” (Parks xv).

A digital almanac project in which students create their own texts in the first person corresponds to Park’s definition of “hybrid voice.” On the one hand, the student as individual and non-expert is asked to observe and report effects of local nature on his or her own experiences. On the other hand, the potential for writing from the first person to become detached from its context is ameliorated because the individual is placed within her local ecology. Parks could be describing a hypertext almanac project when he says,

Rather, the hybridity of voice stands for the dual desire both to create a sense of individual identity within traditions existing within a classroom space (expressivist or constructivist or both) and to place that voice within traditions of collective action—sites where individual identity is subsumed under a community’s collective needs. ‘Voice,’ therefore, can come to stand as a hybrid relationship between individual need and collective action. (18)

For example, this portion of the larger project may develop an understanding of how to weigh the need for environmental change against the needs of a neighborhood. Further, Parks’ experience with Urban Rhythms lays out ways to anticipate and possibly avoid the pitfalls of first person narrative pitched toward social justice. Just as bootstrap, American dream style conservatism inserted itself into the narratives of students and community members who participated in his project, nature writing is filled with ideological traps such as nostalgia. Even though writing about nature may value the pastoral over the urban in uncritical ways, a hypertext project may be uniquely suited to avoiding constraints of nostalgia when writing about nature to petition for radical progress toward sustainability.

            Nathaniel A. Rivers and Ryan P. Weber point toward several ways a project such as the one I gesture to above can avoid ideological constraints built into inherited nature writing genres. In their article “Ecological, Pedagogical, PublicRhetoric,” Rivers and Weber argue

…we readily recognize the impact of rhetoric’s greatest hits while neglecting the mundane texts that shape institutions and therefore mold human behavior. By highlighting this mundane, ecological approach, we wish to emphasize that most changes proposed by advocates occur through concrete modifications to the institutional structures of government offices, courts, schools, corporations, and religious and community organizations. (188)

Rivers and Webster compare the turn toward the mundane in their FYC’s to work by environmental artist Christo Javacheff, who “considers the permits he files and the public hearings he attends to be as vital to his art as the final product” (188). As part of their digital service learning final projects, Rivers and Weber require students to write such in such mundane genres as formal applications and letter to the editor. I take River and Webster’s emphasis on the mundane seriously and plan to require similar textual production from my students. For example if noise pollution is damaging urban birds, can students file a petition with the city to eliminate it? If a student wanted to stage a protest against the noise pollution, what permits would he have to obtain in advance?

            I have some ways to go before the projects examined above could be used in a classroom. That said, situating the two types of writing in relation to each other via a hypertext might reduce ideological problems inherent to both genres. A personal almanac or seasonal blog about local environment can easily fall into a longing for a past that never exited and valorization of the pastoral over the urban. That sort of nostalgia undermines environmental progress, in part, because it is not practical. When permits or letters to the editor can be linked to personal, local experience they take on greater pathos and more urgency. Through writing in different genres, students emerge with an ability to make choices that depend on rhetorical situation and audience needs.