Kristine Blair's Literacy Narrative Blair, Kristine (2008-05-13) >>KRISTINE BLAIR: But I have plusses in written and reading. >>GAIL: That's good. >>KRISTINE BLAIR: That is good. That makes sense. I know. [Laughter] >>GAIL: If you can't do anything but satisfactory plus. >>KRISTINE BLAIR: Or plus. >>GAIL: Is plus better than satisfactory plus? >>KRISTINE BLAIR: Yes, but like my principal's name was Principal Hard. She was mean. [Laughter] >>KRISTINE BLAIR: Mrs. Hard was very mean. >>GAIL: Okay, so are we back? So, it's my pleasure actually to introduce Kris Blair who we're going to interview for the next thirty minutes and she's going to be telling us something about her literacy background and practices. And I'm wondering if you could begin by saying what you remember about our family's literacy practices and then use any of the artifacts we were asked to bring in as far as your literacy narratives are concerned. >>KRISTINE BLAIR: There's definitely an advantage to being interviewed second because as you were talking, Gail, about various certain things your parents read and did, I was able to reflect on my own parents and I know that they were in their different ways very avid readers and avid literacy proponents. My mom, to this day just reads voraciously and so she was always reading mysteries, that's her favorite genre and my father read true detective stories. And so I remember a lot about reading being valued very much so. In fact, as a little girl my mom would always insist that I enter those reading contests and so she would take me to the town library and I would have a sufficient number of books for the week and then when I had come back and read them all I would get one of these little guys, a little certificate that said I was a good reader. And so as we were going through artifacts for this particular project, we had dozens of these. We had more of those than anything else. So, yes there was a lot of literacy. And I remember, as my mother swears because she was a teacher that-- >>GAIL: What did she teach? >>KRISTINE BLAIR: She taught Title One. She was a big proponent of phonics and so now we get into arguments about the validity of phonics, but at any rate she was a phonics teacher, so we learned to read very early and doing well in school was considered a big, big deal. It was interesting going back through these artifacts, though, to realize how much of the literacy in terms of just cultural literacy and the way that you talked about with your father really just encompassed more than just reading and writing. So some of the pictures that I started looking at with my husband the other night included things like technologies of gender, so understanding what it means to be a girl and how that involves toys, like I had a stove, I had a hair dryer, and I remember getting those little kits and things. Though I will say there was some emphasis on whatever digital technologies were available. So I remember when I was around 8 or 9, my parents bought me a tape recorder, so that would be the equivalent of our digital video recorder today, and I used to do silly things like tape Sanford and Son. I would tape television shows to listen back to or I would tape myself singing, so a lot of it was really experimentation play, not really any particular scholarly purpose, but what would there really be when you're 8? >>GAIL: No, and you were nevertheless doing that. And I mean sort of the interesting thing when we were doing mine, if you had asked me about other toys, say besides that bicycle that I had, it was right after World War II, and all the manufacturing was not focused on doing toys and so forth. And there weren't anything like tape recorders really around at that time for us to use, so you really see the generational differences here. >>KRISTINE BLAIR: Absolutely, though I think it's interesting because we were both only children and I think that my own cultural biases or the biases or narratives that we tell about our lives and our families, I know that my family was very working class and so my own understanding of this was oh, we didn't have very much growing up and then last weekend I was confronted with all of these photographs, where there's just like toys everywhere and all sorts of different toys like cash registers and telephones, so I think my parents were sort of interested in giving as much as they could to me in their needs and since I was an only child, that process was much easier. So one thing was I had a television in my room. It was a little black and white T. My mother always says for every toy we gave you, we gave you a book. And she will still tell that story today and it's true, but at the same time there were these other literacies going. >>GAIL: How old were you when you got the television? >>KRISTINE BLAIR: Very young. I would suspect around six. >>GAIL: You probably got your parents' old television. I'm thinking, I was just thinking that they got a new television and that-- >>KRISTINE BLAIR: Well, they did have televisions but I still sort of get on my mom about this, that why didn't we ever make the switch to a color television. For years we didn't have a color television and then I think that gets back into that sort of working class mind set that we couldn't afford a color television, yet we could afford stereos and sleds and this sort of stuff. So I laugh about that today, but I was very much a television child. I watched television all the time late at night. My parents, maybe I was spoiled in some respect; they really didn't monitor what I watched. They didn't monitor when I should go to bed. I just think they sort of knew that if I had to get up they knew I would go to sleep. >>GAIL: And so then you would be getting up in the morning of course for school. And you talked a little bit about your school literacies. To shift a little bit, do you remember when you were introduced to computers? And was it in the home? Was it in the school? >>KRISTINE BLAIR: Well I learned to use computers about the same time you did. So it was 1983 and I was working as a work-study student in the journalism department. My major was journalism and I had been the editor of my school paper when I was in high school and so I was really very thankful to have this 20 hour a week job. I had to work to put myself through school and I was the assistant to the department secretary. And so around that time, they had the BT 100 machines and you could do email on those machines and email was still just so new in '83 that I was excited that I could kind of send an email, send a report to somebody on campus that needed to have the report. >>GAIL: And that was, the screen-- >>KRISTINE BLAIR: The line editor. And even when I went to Purdue in '89, it was still--they had those in the labs. I can't remember what the program was. >>GAIL: VM, VX, VM4X? Because it was the (inaudible) that used to take us at Purdue to this lab and he would let us use-- >>KRISTINE BLAIR: Oh, Victor Raskett. >>GAIL: Yes. [Laughter] >>KRISTINE BLAIR: We have a shared history. That's probably why they paired us together in some ways. But no, so I would type on my BM's electric and those were pretty much the technology. I remember taking a type writer home when I was around 16, so that I could type my papers. So typing in college for this position and even for my studies wasn't a difficult thing, though ironically in high school I took a typing class and got a D. And my father laughed about that because I had 5 A's and a D. >>GAIL: Yeah, it's probably not so unusual that you and I were introduced to computers about the same time since as I said, that's when computers came out. The first Mac was in 1983, although I didn't use --wait, not the Mac, the first--yeah the first Macintosh. The Apple was out there before, but the actual Macintosh wasn't. >>KRISTINE BLAIR: The journalism department had Sanyo's. They had Sanyo personal computer, about a quarter inch disc, the program was One Star and so in getting my first computer, my mother did buy me a Sanyo. It had 256 K. I was all excited because I had it at home to work on all my papers and it was very nice. I started graduating to higher end machines. After I got my BA, I was a TA in the English department and I taught sections of first year composition, not in computerized settings, but we had access to labs where I could work with learning skilled students. >>GAIL: Where was this at? >>KRISTINE BLAIR: In Cal State, Sacramento. And I did that both during my Master's and a year in between my Master's and my PhD, so this was like '88. So during that 5 year period, my skill-set grew somewhat, but not really beyond word processing and learning particular spreadsheet programs at the time. I learned a little bit about the email. It really wasn't until Purdue that my knowledge base expanded because I was actually getting to teach in these environments more than I was in California. >>GAIL: And you were teaching professional writing programs? >>KRISTINE BLAIR: I did. I taught in the professional writing program at Purdue and I remember teaching in the math science building on the little baby Mac Classics and having these big guy engineers sitting in front of these very tiny machines doing things with page maker, dora, and other programs to do their reports and their manuals, and sometimes just depending on the project, doing a brochure. So that was exciting. Just the design space was really horrific because-- >>GAIL: Because you had your class and then you had all these other people >>KRISTINE BLAIR: Yeah, you had your class of 25 students and then you had another 25 machines and then because this was in the basement of the math science building, there's be these pillars, so if you wanted to see your class you kind of had to dodge around the pillars. So you had to make sure your students that you had to keep your eye on were up toward you in terms of group pairings and things like that. So it definitely has been an evolution. >>GAIL: Okay, so how would you talk about, then, sort of your progression through the different technologies that became available or not during this time, continuing on? >>KRISTINE BLAIR: Well in '94 I graduated from Purdue and my first job was at Texas A&M Corpus Christi and what was exciting about that particular position was that all the courses that I was teaching were in a computer lab. And so I taught two sections of technical writing and two sections of first year comp. And I taught on PC comps, I taught in math labs depending on which was which; you might be in a different building that wasn't the humanities building, so to speak. And so I had a lot of access to learning digital tools, but the other thing that was so interesting about that experience was that was right at the point where people started, had the web and people started doing html for the web. So I started teaching myself, with the help of an assistance administrator, I started teaching myself html. So you know I'd do tag, title, tag and really go through the whole process. And I remember spending agonizing amounts of time after school teaching myself how to learn html. I would stay late at work and not go home so I could learn this and sometimes Jack, the system's administrator, would be around and would help. But it was great because by the end of it I learned how to design my own website and really I was self-taught other than him saying, no you've got to do this or you've got to do that. He'd hand me a book. He would say it's so cool that we actually have a faculty member learning this, so I started assigning these types of projects to my classes. >>GAIL: I was going to say I remember one of the first pieces then that you submitted to Computers and Writing before you became editor of Computers and Writing, Computers and Composition online, was the piece where the students had done a review of computers and teaching that Sidney and Brian and Paul did, and actually you knew all that code. And I think that was the first piece that we presented that was in Computers and Composition online. Or was it someplace else first? >>KRISTINE BLAIR: It went someplace else. I'm not quite sure where it sort of landed. It was a student project that you could still find on the way back machine, but it was great to be able to transfer that skill to students and the nice thing for me was that when I was at Corpus Christi they said oh, we have someone who can do this, and we'll give you course release if you start doing pages and do maintenance for the arts and humanities division. And of course this is in the day before they actually have trained IT professionals to do that and as I was sort of winding down my time at Corpus Christi I actually got on search committees that would hire individuals who could do that. >>GAIL: So I mean by any standards you would be regarded as a leader in technology or Computers and Writing today. Don't make a face at me. >>KRISTINE BLAIR: Honestly, I don't know about that. I think the technology changes too quickly to be a leader. [Laughter] >>GAIL: Alright well do you want to talk a little bit about how you became or your editorship at Computers and Writing? So technology changes quickly, but I don't think that detracts from you having been a leader. >>KRISTINE BLAIR: No probably not. I think that what happened for me at that time and again this was the mid-90's, my dissertation was not in the field of computers and writing. It was a cultural studies dissertation that looked at the ways in which popular culture can and should have a viable place in the writing curriculum. And really at the time and place wasn't a really original idea, but the spin that I did included things like the representation of women online or women through advertising, and then as we started going online, you well know that that sort of shift to the representation of women sort of re-inscribed traditional gender roles and stereotypes. So there was a theoretical question that I wanted to ask as a scholar and doing that lead me much more in the field of C and W than I ever expected. And the sheer fact that I was teaching in these environments also contributed to that. So I think my reading base increased, my teaching skills increased, and I started learning more tools, moving beyond Microsoft Word, moving beyond PowerPoint to focus on html and some of the programs at the time. Some of the programs that now made web operating easy so that by ‘97 you didn't have to know code anymore, but my motto is a little html code goes a long way. >>GAIL: But I think actually you doing your dissertation in that area is what has made your work so enduring. I mean I can remember probably more than ten years ago we did ----- way too fast and that chapter that appeared in the MLA, and this is true too, I honestly remember being so pleased when Kris could contribute to the, you contribute to the listserv because everything you said was so smart and we were able to use lots of what you said. >>KRISTINE BLAIR: Well that's so funny because when I would sign that in the class I would tell the class, I'm LC. Aren't those smart comments, those are from LC. That's me. [Laughter] >>GAIL: Yeah but I mean that enabled you to be able to, you had a theoretical base to whatever work that you did, your Computers and Composition, which still endures to this day. >>KRISTINE BLAIR: Well and I think that part of the issue is having the time and this is true, having the time to keep up with reading, keep up with the changes. So the shift to digital video and I know I made that shift so I'm comfortable using digital video and audio technologies, but back then then advent of what we have now is all so exciting, but also so scary just because there's so many tools out there to do, so many different things. I just learned a new wiki tool the other day for a C and W presentation and I really like it so I'm excited that there's actually a wiki tool that I like. But you know like blogs, how do you sort of keep up with this information overload and the tools of dissemination that are out there. >>GAIL: Yeah, to keep up with the reading and the theoretical work at the same time. >>KRISTINE BLAIR: It's very, very difficult. But it's worth it. >>GAIL: Yeah but I see that as one of the special challenges of our field. Something that makes it so difficult, having to keep up on all those spots is more perhaps than if you were studying medieval literature. >>KRISTINE BLAIR: Yes although they would tell you no. You have to edit that out. [Laughter] >>GAIL: Yes, they're also often very technologically adept as well. What else would you like to say about obstacles? Well I guess you have talked a little about that. >>KRISTINE BLAIR: Well, I think my biggest obstacle is time and the changing nature of one's career. I think there's always that presumption that as one advances, that some of the nuts and bolts of the technology get handed off to other people, and I certainly see that in my own life, but at the same time I want to keep up. So I'll be sitting in the Chair's office doing what I have to do in that role but then if Sidney sent that email the other morning about Sophie I though well I've got a free hour here, I'm going to download it and start playing. And so I think that that's been my way of keeping up. My husband sort of tells me that it's my form of relaxing to play with technology, to be on my computer, to just watch an old movie and then be on Wikipedia sort of finding out what happened to these old actors and things like that. So I think I've made a space in my life for that, for that type of experimentation. >>GAIL: Which is really important, I think. Now you did bring your phone here, your artifact. [Laughter] >>KRISTINE BLAIR: I did. That's because you brought yours out. I was competing; I was being competitive with Gail. >>GAIL: But how about, is this playing a role in-- >>KRISTINE BLAIR: It does in some ways. I'd have to say that one of the things I do and it's because I'm a Chair I guess, is I really limit access to contact via this mechanism. The Department Secretary has this number, the Dean has it, I don't give it out freely to anyone. Some of my friends and colleagues have it, but very few, probably there are only about five or six people that actually have my cell phone number and call me on my cell. It is communication between Kevin and me. It's so funny, we've become texters. We finally are text messaging each other because he started a new job about three months ago and so there's that effort to sort of not look like you're on the phone with your wife all the time, especially since it's a corporate setting. So we text, we're texting like crazy just so we can talk about things. And last night I got and he says I'll be out mowing. So I had to call him and check in. And so yeah, I like that. I'm the same way. We went to Vegas over New Year's to one of my Hello Kitty, as you can see from my little charm, I feel like a 16-year-old, but I sort of don't care, but I'm in front of the Hello Kitty store. [Laughter] >>GAIL: Okay, alright, very good, yeah. Okay and do you see this contributing to scholarship in some way. Or is scholarship getting done on this size screen rather than on-- >>KRISTINE BLAIR: I do think that that's the future. At the same time, that might be where my own generational limits come into play. This has web access, but my ability to function in that space. I was talking to someone the other day and we needed some information and she whipped out her Blackberry and was able to call it up automatically and I thought oh lordy, that would have taken me a really long time to do. So I can talk, I can take pictures, I can shoot video, and I can text. Navigating the web on these spaces is very, very difficult for me. I always try to access my Facebook and have difficulties. >>GAIL: Alright, well it's been a pleasure talking with you. Any final words? >>KRISTINE BLAIR: Just to follow up on the sort of shift in the technologies, I think it is our responsibility as, not even just computers and writing specialists, but as English teachers to really look for ways to bridge the gap between what students are doing with these technologies and what we're doing. The idea that here's a card I made when I was 5 or 6 for my mom, or a poem, another one, and the idea that now you can do that electronically. So that we've completely made this cultural and academic shift to digital literacy, yet it's sad to me that within the English curriculum, we seem to have a number of factions that hold out. And I sometimes worry that in these roles, we end up talking to ourselves and we need to talk to our colleagues. And we need to let our students know that we embrace these technologies, and I think that's why Facebook-- >>GAIL: And that we accept their role in embracing this technology too. So I try to do that in such a way so that students can do their final projects on Facebook, well it's easier when I'm doing a language course to do something like that. And also that they can do Flash productions and so forth. So it doesn't have to all be in writing. >>KRISTINE BLAIR: No, and the thing is that can be so liberating. At the same time I think our students have very traditional expectations of what an English class is supposed to be. I was sort of giving some advice to one of our graduate students who taught an intermediate writing course in a lab where she had them doing i-movies. And some students very much resisted that saying I thought this was a writing course. Because of course as you introduce these technologies, the labors associated with them are so invisible, so how do you get to that sort of final product, whether it be a course syllabus online or a video of yourself introducing the course to students. >>GAIL: That's exactly what happened at Stanford with that new second writing course that they introduced that was heavily into media. The students rebelled. And I think primarily probably because of the time and expectations. >>KRISTINE BLAIR: Yeah, so how do we change the expectations? How do we get students to see that all of this in their own generation because it's not paper anymore, it's electronic, how do we get them to see all of this as writing? The photos that they have on flicker, the Facebooking and the Myspaceing that they do. The research that they might do online, the reading they do online. To see all of that as contributing to what happens in the classroom so by the time they get to the writing course where they are asked to do a digital video; they don't go what do you mean? This is a writing course, where's the grammar instruction? It's like good lord. [Laughter] >>GAIL: Right and here with you getting final record with you getting a new internet survey that you've done, students say just that, that they don't regard the things that they do on computers, the things that they do with the cell phone, the communication that they do as actually being writing. >>KRISTINE BLAIR: See and we do, so how do we sort of have that conversation with students to not have this level of resistance. Because I think the students could be powerful allies in helping us educate colleagues. >>GAIL: Yes, exactly. Thank you. >>KRISTINE BLAIR: Thanks. >>GAIL: How long do we go? I thought I wrote it down. >>SPEAKER 1: You're good, 20--almost exactly the same. >>SPEAKER 2: Perfect you guys did perfect. I like the fact that you did it together and you had artifacts.