A Conference Paper

In the spring of 2009, I presented a paper at the Conference on College Composition and Communications (CCCC), the largest conference in my discipline. The concept, that architecture (virtual and real) influences student identity and their education, was a new one for me, and represented work I did in a course called, "Rhetoric and the Body." This is where my formal articulations of place/space left off, or at least, it represents one aspect of place consciousness ... the more I read the more I don't know, and the more avenues I see that are worth rambling down.



Corporatized Education and the Distortion of Place


Western thought, as architect and theorist Juhani Pallasmaa notes, maintains “ocular privilege,” the hierarchal categorization of the human senses that places vision at the top of the sensory scale. The old adage, “seeing is believing” reflects this ocularcentrism as a cultural artifact and practice built within philosophical and rhetorical traditions. Pallasmaa notes that “since the Greeks, philosophical writings of all times have abounded with ocular metaphors to the point knowledge has become analogous with clear vision, and light is regarded as the metaphor of truth” (15).

Plato asserted that vision was man’s greatest gift and that “ethical universals must be accessible to ‘the mind’s eye,’ while Aristotle claimed, “sight as the most noble of the senses” (Pallasmaa citing Plato and Aristotle, 15). It seems that within Western philosophical tradition and our contemporary practices, vision’s hegemonic privilege has not been displaced, and the ways in which vision – literally and figuratively – shapes our “lived, perceived, and constructed” experiences remains largely unexamined. For many, what is seen is also what is represented, and what is represented does not have value unless it is seen. As Pallasmaa notes, this “perspectival representation” has made the eye the very center of the perceived world and the concept of Self (16).

Ocularcentrism, coupled with the corporatized university, may be limiting or even undermining teaching and learning within classrooms, particularly writing classrooms that rely on the critical exploration of subjectivity and aesthetic practices. These limitations have often been misidentified as “student resistance” instead of symptoms of a larger, more complicated matrix of cultural practice, spatiality, institutional power, representation, and framing.

Teaching in thirdspace,” and “working towards multiple instead of binary constructions” as a possible, rewarding counterchallenge to ocular privilege that can promote sensory and epistemological hybridity. This hybridity, as Homi Bhabha (1994) and Edward Soja (1996) assert, utilizes the everyday experiences of students and teachers, their spaces, literacies, and knowledges as a means through which to make new meanings. The counterchallenge to ocular privilege through what Soja terms “critical thirding” – when we attempt to think beyond “either/or binaries” and toward “either/with and also” triadic constructions – may have consequences that reach far beyond the classroom.

By learning to “critically third” (Soja 1996) students and teachers are then free to integrate their multiple literacies and perspectives instead of positioning them in opposition to academic and institutional representations. As Elisabeth Birr Moje et al. assert, “The notion of hybridity can thus apply to the integration of competing knowledges and Discourses; to the texts one reads and writes; to the spaces, contexts, and relationships one encounters; and even to a person’s identity enactments and sense of self (42).

Ocular privilege and institutional practices frame and construct students’ lived experiences on campus, undermine or limit their academic endeavors, and complicate teaching. The best example I have comes from my own experiences while teaching “Rhetoric as Inquiry” at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This first-year writing course places me in day-to-day contact with first-year students, the majority of which live on campus. The spaces in which they live are constructed for them by the institution to meet the institution’s freshmen retention goals. Students’ spatial relationships with campus architecture begin several months before fall classes begin.

As I’ve observed, later conflict with their lived experiences.
This conflict begins with my institution’s representation of student life on campus and its approach to student recruitment. The architectural design of University of Nebraska-Lincoln positions City Campus as the center of student and academic life. The student union, the epicenter of commerce and communal space on campus, stands at the center of our campus’ main street. Resident halls, libraries, administrative buildings, academic departments, the recreation center, alumni center, and even the Multicultural Center either flank or fall in rank with this campus center. All tours for perspective students and their parents begin at our student union, and its features such as fast food restaurants, computer labs, the university bookstore, Starbuck’s counter, computer store, and other resources, are privileged as a site of possible communal, social activity.

Student guides lead prospective students and their parents from the union to the most recently remodeled resident hall featuring a state-of-the-art dining facility. The cafeteria itself features primary colors and modern furniture, and “food cooked to order” stations such as a grill, pizzeria, pasta bar, and ethnic foods center. The culinary emphasis is on individual tastes and preferences, and the cafeteria itself resembles the typical food court at any suburban shopping mall.

Housing, too, has become more about individuality within a simulated communal construction as the traditional dormitory architecture of the 1960s and 70s has given way to apartment-style housing. Each apartment has its own kitchen and living room with bedrooms constructed around these common areas. These living quarters are very much like large, metropolitan apartment complexes with center courtyards and manicured landscapes. The waiting list is long, so these apartment dormitories often are awarded to upperclassmen first, and are significantly more expensive than the traditional dorms on campus. As a result, the apartments at “Husker Courtyards” have become symbols of status and fortune for those first-year students who get them.

However, economic privilege isn’t the only one at play. Student identity within the campus geography is affirmed by the architectural implications that place traditional 18-22 year-old students as the visual center on campus. The campus structures are not just utilitarian constructs in service to institutional goals and purposes. Though they are aesthetically pleasing, these sites are designed to reach further into the human experience. Campus architects, “instead of creating mere objects of visual seduction” are constructing “architecture [that] relates, mediates and projects meaning” (Pallasmaa 11).

Because these buildings are designed to reflect uniformity and efficiency, because they express what Henri Lefebvre and Karl Marx would term their “mode of production” (Lefebvre citing Marx, 24), they project far more than good design. The campus itself has been transformed into an academic city for those students who live there, and the structures themselves make “…even the most abstract relationships – legal, political, ideological – tangible” (Lefebvre 24).

When students and parents tour our campus, they are shopping for real estate. Much like potential homebuyers on HGTV’s “House Hunters” and “Property Virgins,” students encounter the institutional space and then decide whether or not they can “see themselves living there.” The emphasis on amenities and social activities reflects this ocularcentric evaluation of quality – “seeing is believing” becomes an institutional marketing strategy.

However, because direct vision is privileged as ethical and “the most noble of our senses,” students and their parents cannot see what the institution has deemed peripheral – namely – the intellectual rigors of academic inquiry and learning. One can’t easily tour a scholar’s curricula or the sites of qualitative research. One can’t walk through the Dean’s List or promenade through a syllabus and required reading list. There are few architectural markers for academic work tour guides can point to and ask tour participants to see.

The resulting “blindness” to intellectual activity on campus is an example of what Pallasmaa terms “poverty in the field of peripheral vision” (13). In many ways, corporatized university recruitment and retention practices manufacture this poverty through real and virtual constructions that push intellectual pursuits to the margins of student life. Long before the physical tours there are the virtual representations online: videos, testimonials, even a social networking tool similar to Facebook my institution calls “Redbook” - all designed to lure students into constructing a perception of what their college life at the University of Nebraska could be. In some ways, the physical tours serve as a continued conversation, a mediated representation that takes students from virtuality to reality.

Meanings projected by my institution’s architectural and virtual constructions place student social interactions as definitive markers of consumer satisfaction. Framing university life this way, the institution creates Discourses that mediate parents’ and students’ uncertainties about college. Within these frames, the very emotional location of parent and student anxiety can be tamed. “Within the frame,” Robin Lakoff writes, “things are unmarked: normal, predictable, neutral, orderly, natural, and simple. They do not require explanation” (48). In short, these frames create a poverty of peripheral vision.

This direct, constructed vision of student life pushes all that outside of it to the margins, and this abstract collision of “legal, political, and ideological” relationships later becomes embodied identity performance when classes begin. In the hundreds of student personal essays I’ve read, the majority have included a common narrative, that “college isn’t what [they] thought it would be” and that “it’s nothing like what the university promised.” The majority of my students have expressed, in multiple and complex ways, feeling “duped” by the university because it did not deliver on its “advertised promises.”

This tension between the institution’s construction and framing of student life and students’ lived experiences within the corporatized university is not a matter of false advertising. Instead, as Robert Lane asserts, customer dissatisfaction occurs because advertising’s “…function is to increase people’s dissatisfaction with any current state of affairs, to create wants, and to exploit the dissatisfaction of the present” (179). This is evident in our institution’s most prominent slogan, “There’s no place like Nebraska,” which implies that any choice outside of UNL would be a lesser one.

Unfortunately, this marketing tactic presents a Faustian bargain. Though my university administration chooses “positive” representations of student culture, the very nature of advertising negates this framing because consumers themselves suffer from what Lane terms “ambivalence and regret.” Ambivalence is uncertainty experienced as displacement and pain that “…exemplifies our divided selves, our multiple identities” (179) as prudent savers and spenders. Regretting a major purchase, which a college education certainly is, occurs in what he terms “postdecision dissonance reduction,” when consumers mediate their conscience in an attempt to reassure themselves that what they bought is far better than what they did not or could not buy (Lane 179).

As students and their parents battle “buyer’s remorse,” the institutional response is not to reconsider its framing and marketing of campus life (largely because enrollment is up). Instead, the administration asks its faculty and staff to provide “customer service” in order to alleviate, manage, or prevent the sort of dissatisfaction that would send a customer shopping for something better. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln used focus group and surveys to create a “service model” designed to guarantee every student had satisfactory and consistent service from every branch within the institution.

In a document produced and distributed by Student Involvement Services, UNL faculty and staff are asked to serve students “the Big Red Way” (Workman 2006). The primary message: “Like it or not, we’re in the relationship business,” and our primary site for service will be the negotiation of student work. Faculty, lecturers, and graduate teaching assistants are encouraged to “work through deadlines and commitments carefully” in order to “make a difference” in student-consumer experiences. The institutional focus in this service manual is on “interdependence” and faculty and staff, as good service providers are to help students see that their relationship with the institution is collaborative and not prescribed (6).

The intellectual work we foster and model as educators is again cast to the periphery as the institution’s focus is on retention through environmental constructions and perceptions. It’s within the peripheral blind spot that I encounter students who express buyer’s remorse, ambivalence, and the institutionally pre-scripted student subjectivity. When I became an instructor, I first interpreted the performances of this remorse – a lack of student engagement, classroom silences, a reluctance to discuss difficult concepts, sending and responding to text messages, and the covert one iPod plug in the ear, as resistance.

I assumed students arrived carrying the baggage of high school and the stereotypical teenage angst toward adults. Limited by this “Teacher v. Student” binary, I could not interpret student behavior as influenced by spatial relationships outside of the classroom. I assumed our contact and perceptions of each other were located solely within the classroom, somehow free of institutional representation. I did my best to enact and embody critical pedagogy, the practices and promises of reflexive learning when teachers and students learn from and teach to each other. Unfortunately and yet fortunately, I was met with student demands to “just tell me what to write” and “tell me what to do.”

While taking a course on institutional power, I first explored Edward Soja’s notion of “thirdspace.” What I learned by sensory exploration of our perceived, constructed, and lived experiences is that my perceptions of students and constructed teaching methods didn’t mesh with students’ lived college experiences. In their narratives I read and sensed frustration with being asked to embrace autonomous inquiry. At first I was baffled by this frustration, and often wondered why students came to college – the epitome of intellectual work in my world – expecting their social agenda to be our shared priority. Like many instructors of first-year writing courses, I assumed the “problem” rested in my methodology and often toiled for hours trying to figure out how to convince my students that rhetoric as inquiry and writing could be fun, worth their time, and interesting.

I tried to represent myself as the comical and good-natured President of the Nerd Club while recruiting pledges, unable to see how totally lame and unattractive membership and its privileges would seem to students who literally bought their social constructions on the tuition installment plan. The harder I tried to encourage students to embrace inquiry as an exploration of the unknown, and writing as a way of exploring thinking instead of articulating their “ready-made conclusions” (Qualley, 23), the more they seemed to resist. So, in an act of desperation and “critical thirding” I decided to compare my perceived, constructed, and lived teacher experiences with my students’ perceived, constructed, and lived experiences.
The inquiry began with a question: “What are we supposed to do in this space?” I explained Chela Sandoval’s notion of “differential consciousness” and the potential of functioning “on an altogether different register” so that we could identify or name our differences (182-83). I explained perceived spaces as those we imagine, and constructed space as architecturally planned. I then explained the significance of our lived experiences as connected to, or interplaying with, those concepts. This allowed us, as Soja writes, to create “a space of extraordinary openness, a place of critical exchange where geographical imagination can be expanded to encompass a multiplicity of perspectives that have heretofore been considered by the epistemological referees to be incompatible, uncombinable” (5).

What we learned through that first conversation is that we had very different ideologies at play when considering education. For me, education was an effort to expand one’s intellectual knowledge while increasing one’s quality of life. For the majority of my students, education was something they were forced to do if they were going to get a job. The more I spoke of inquiry as an exploration of the unknown, the more they spoke of wanting a concrete definition of rhetoric. What we learned by comparing notes is that they had bought the institutional framing of their education as a tidy, linear progression. Even as freshmen they were picturing graduation – an ocular privileging of product (the degree) over the invisible, peripheral process of working toward one. So when I asked them to set aside institutional representation in order to pursue autonomous, student-driven inquiry, I was, quite literally, asking them to march into territory undefined by institutional and cultural practices. To them, I was giving them a tour of Nowhere, the center of their peripheral blindness, and they were lost without architectural and institutional frames marking their paths by reflecting their assigned student-consumer identities.

This initial conversation in the spring of 2008 brought me to completely revise my first-year “Rhetoric as Inquiry” curriculum. The course is designed as process-driven with inquiry as the primary goal. We begin first by reading accessible education theory by writers such as Paolo Freire, Henry Giroux, and Alfie Kohn. Our first project centers on education and students write narratives of their best and worst education experiences then try to put them into theoretical context. We work together to name the differences between their perceived and imagined college experiences, the institutional construction of their education and environment, then compare them to their lived experiences.

What we learn, through practicing Krista Ratcliffe’s notion of “rhetorical listening” in order to explore how our differences can influence our commonalities, is that in the end, we all feel duped by corporatized university practices. However, we use this sense of displacement, when our perceived, constructed, and lived experiences don’t quite mesh, as a means through which to explore our connections. What I’ve discovered in the last two semesters is that incoming first-year students are often surprised to be asked to voice their informed opinions on their own education. They are equally surprised to learn so many have made education theory and practice their life’s work. Even more interesting to me, is how often students write end of the term narratives claiming that they now have a sense of purpose within their educational goals outside of the prescribed, “go to school, get a job” framing culture and universities promote.

We strengthen our peripheral vision skills by relieving ourselves first of the sensory overload advertising and institutional representation proliferate. “Seeing” is no longer believing” as we complicate privileged notions of vision in order to “…open up new realms of vision and thought, freed of the implicit desire of the eye for control and power” (Pallasmaa 13). We play Peter Elbow’s “doubting and believing game” to create suspicion among our treasured binaries such as “good and bad,” success and failure,” “work and play.” We do this because, as Moje et al. write, “In third space … what seem like oppositional categories can actually work together to generate new knowledges, new Discourses, and new forms of literacy” (42). This commitment and suspicion of binaries “…demands that when one reads phrases such as ‘academic versus everyday literacies or knowledge,’ one wonders about other ways of being literate that are not acknowledged in such simple binary constructions” (Moje et al. 42).

As a result, our intellectual exchanges become cultural exchanges as one cannot articulate a lived experience without also providing cultural and subjective context. Within our creative work, as we write, provide peer reviews and revise our essays and projects together, we affirm Pallasmaa’s assertion that through creative work, “…a powerful identification and projection takes place; the entire bodily and mental constitution of the maker becomes the site of the work” (12). Students must speak, listen, feel, and see inside and outside of the work without ocular privilege, and learn to represent their autonomous inquiry using all of their senses instead of relying on the marketed vision of college. This affirmation of contextual identity, a hybrid representation of their everyday and academic lives, affords them a sense of personal multiplicity instead of a fixed binary of Self and Other. Our abstract relationships become tangible spaces we occupy and traverse. Poor no more, we are rich with autonomous inquiry, reaching from our constructed classroom into our lived experiences.

Works Cited
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, New York: 1994.

Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. Oxford University Press, London, New York: 1973.

Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. The Language War. University of California Press; Berkeley: 2000.

Lane, Robert E. The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies. Yale University Press; New Haven, CT: 2000.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Urban Revolution. University of Minnesota Press; Minneapolis, MN: 2003.

Moje, Elizabeth B. et al. “Working Toward Third space in Content Area Literacy: An Examination of Everyday Funds of Knowledge and Discourse.” Reading Research Quarterly. Vol. 39, No. 1. Jan/Feb/March; International Reading Assocation: 2004.

Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and Its Senses. Wiley-Academy, a division of John Wiley and Sons, Inc.; Chester, West Sussex, England: 2005.

Qualley, Donna. Turns of Thought: Teaching Composition as Reflexive Inquiry. Boynton/Cook Publishers; Portsmouth, NH: 1997.

Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Southern Illinois University Press; Carbondale, IL: 2005.

Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. University of Minnesota Press; Minneapolis, MN: 2000.

Soja, Edward. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Blackwell; Malden, MA: 1996.

Workman, Thomas. “Get to Know Me: Institutional Research Findings on Student Needs.” Student Involvement; University of Nebraska-Lincoln: 2006. http://www.retain.unl.edu/GetToKnowMeBook.pdf