The Embodied Playbook: Writing Practices of Student-Athletes - Brossura

Rifenburg, J. Michael

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1607326884 ISBN 13: 9781607326885

Casa editrice: Utah State Univ Pr, 2018

Riassunto

The Embodied Playbook discovers a new approach to understanding student literacy in a surprising place: the university athletics department. Through analysis of a yearlong case study of the men’s basketball team at the University of North Georgia, J. Michael Rifenburg shows that a deeper and more refined understanding of how humans learn through physical action can help writing instructors reach a greater range of students.

Drawing from research on embodiment theory, the nature and function of background knowledge, jazz improvisation, and other unexpected domains, The Embodied Playbook examines a valuable but unexplored form of literacy: the form used by student-athletes when learning and using scripted plays. All students’ extracurricular prior knowledge is vital for the work they undertake in the classroom, and student-athletes understand the strengths and constraints of written text much as they understand the text of game plays: through embodying text and performing it in a competitive space. The book focuses on three questions: What are plays and what do they do? How do student-athletes learn plays? How can teachers of composition and rhetoric better connect with student-athletes?

The Embodied Playbook reveals the literacy of the body as a rich and untapped resource for writing instruction. Given the numbers of students who are involved in athletics, whether intramural, community-related, or extracurricular, Rifenburg’s conclusions hold important implications not only for how we define literacy but also for how writing programs can serve all of their students most effectively.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull'autore

J. Michael Rifenburg is associate professor and director of first-year composition at the University of North Georgia, where he also serves as Faculty Fellow for Scholarly Writing within the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Leadership. His work has appeared in Composition Forum, Across the Disciplines, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, The Writing Center Journal, and other publications.

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The Embodied Playbook

Writing Practices of Student-Athletes

By J. Michael Rifenburg

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2018 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-688-5

Contents

List of Figures, 
Acknowledgments, 
1. Introduction: Studying the Writing Practices of Our Student-Athletes, 
SECTION I. KNOWING OUR STUDENT-ATHLETES, 
2. What Are Plays and What Do They Do? A Textual Analysis of Football and Basketball Plays, 
3. How Do Student-Athletes Learn Plays? A Case Study of a Division II Men's Basketball Team, 
SECTION II. TEACHING OUR STUDENT-ATHLETE WRITERS, 
4. How Can We Better Teach Our Student-Athlete Writers (Part 1)? A Narrative of a Division I Writing Center, 
5. How Can We Better Teach Our Student-Athlete Writers (Part 2)? Writing Practices as Jazzy, Creative, Collaborative, 
References, 
About the Author, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Studying the Writing Practices of Our Student-Athletes

491,930 student-athletes competed in NCAA sponsored sports in 2016–2017.

— 2016–2017 NCAA Sports Sponsorship and Participation Rates Report

As origin stories are critical to how we understand and undertake our work, I start with two origin stories fueling my inquiry into the writing practices of our student-athletes.

Origin story 1: It is my first summer as an MA student at Auburn University, and I am responsible for supervising mandatory study hours for incoming first-year student-athletes. We are in the first floor of the library. Outside, it is a hot, sticky Alabama summer; inside, it is cold, quiet. A handful of student-athletes work on a paper for their success-strategies class, which I am coteaching with a counseling psychology professor. I am walking around checking on progress. I walk up to a highly recruited wide receiver I will call Trey. The success-strategies paper is his first college paper. He is writing it on Notepad, a clunky, plain-text editor included in all versions of Windows since the initial launch of Windows in 1985. I suggest using Word. Trey's face shows confusion. Talking with him, I learn about his lack of access to technology in his high school and home; I learn about his struggles with writing; I learn about his excitement over being able to start the computer, log on with his new student ID, locate Notepad, and write; I learn of his decorated high-school football career. I leave Trey to Notepad and his writing. My head spins over the palpable disconnect between Trey's academic and athletic preparedness. Trey leaves Auburn for academic reasons less than a year later.

Origin story 2: Again, the setting is Auburn during my time as an MA student. Researching student-athlete literate practices for my thesis, I gain access to a group of first-year football players, the wide receiver in origin story 1 among this group. They are all taking a first-year writing course I am coteaching with a more experienced PhD student. Once the Institutional Review Board approves my research, I sit down to interview a first-year defensive lineman. Let's call him Jason. I ask Jason how he learns the team's complex plays. He tells me a story about being in the locker room early in the season when he voiced frustration aloud with the amount and complexity of the plays. An upperclassman walked over to him. The upperclassman took the cushions off the locker-room sofa and arranged them on the floor in the pattern of a common play Auburn runs. Moving the cushions around the floor, the upperclassman walked Jason through the play's nuances. Jason learned the play and contributed to Auburn's success on the field that season.

Two years later, I graduated and began progress toward a PhD at the University of Oklahoma. In my living room in Norman, Oklahoma, with my one-month-old son in my arms, I watched Auburn win the national championship by defeating the University of Oregon under the lights in Glendale, Arizona. Another student-athlete I cotaught in that first-year writing course kicked the game-winning nineteen-yard field goal. I watched him celebrate, my former student. He ran around, his arms held high, his mouth spread in jubilation, his gold necklace dancing against his shoulder pads. Jason, too, celebrated with his teammates. But Trey, Jason's former teammate and my former student, wasn't there to celebrate. He had left the school before the season started.

These two origin stories propelled my teaching, research, and service over the past decade at two Division I schools and one Division II school. One a story of struggle, one a story of success. At the time, I knew there was something deeper to these stories. One student-athlete struggled to connect his bodily literacy to the academic classroom, while another leveraged his bodily literacy in unique ways to solve a complex cognitive problem: how do I learn hundreds and hundreds of plays? Bodily literacy and knowing through the body is at the heart of these two origin stories. Unfortunately, since bodily literacy does not often figure into traditional conceptions of academic literacy, composition instructors and the programs and people under which they labor do not often privilege bodily literacy in writing-intensive spaces like an FYC classroom or a writing center. This local dismissal of bodily literacies gives rise to global dismissal in that higher education stakeholders often understand the one-half million student-athletes, student-athletes like Trey and Jason, through a cognitive-deficit model: here is what they cannot do, here is what they don't know. This misleading model drives mainstream media headlines, provides fodder for campus conversations, social media posts, and listserv threads. I understand I take a quick leap of logic from the classroom to mainstream media headlines decrying student-athlete academic performance, but in the following pages, I argue compositionists can better work with student-athlete writers by understanding their prior knowledge, a prior knowledge honed through bodily engagement with text and through writing practices that privilege the body as a central mode of meaning making.

I don't naively believe better pedagogical practices of working with student-athlete writers will wash away over a hundred years of stains in the relationship between athletics and academics — stains most clearly visible in the fabric of Division I schools. I soon map this century-long relationship between school and sport but do believe, naively or not, that composition studies has always looked for how to work better with the many unique student populations we are trained and committed to serve. I do believe that despite all the challenges our field endures and has endured, we stay committed to whoever is in our classrooms. I do believe Adam Banks's (2015) words during a powerful moment in his chair's address at the 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication gathering in Tampa — possibly the most powerful speech I have heard in person. With a rising crescendo, he stressed that we — composition teacher-scholars — "served anyhow" (271). No matter the budget deficits, marginalization, and ostracization by and from other disciplines, we "took care of our students anyhow" (271). I do believe engaging with a unique population in a manner of being slow to speak and quick to listen yields reciprocal benefits. The immediate results of knowing our student-athlete writers better may be negligible in term of the national landscape of NCAA athletics. But compositionists play the long game; we serve anyhow.

One year after these two origin stories, I was in New Orleans and walking the halls of my first Conference on College Composition and Communication. Overwhelmed by the sheer size of the conference, my eyes caught the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives booth. Volunteers working the booth capture brief video literacy narratives from conference attendees. These narratives populate an open-access digital archive for instructional and research purposes. A volunteer approached me and invited me to provide one. Into my head popped the origin stories that had altered my view of literacy, learning, higher education, access, college sports. But I couldn't talk about them just yet. I couldn't give voice to how my view of literacy specifically changed. Again, I knew there was something there. Something I couldn't quite put my finger on. All I could have talked about for the video narrative was what I had witnessed and that what I had witnessed made me say hmmm. I declined and walked on.

A decade later, I am ready to give voice to what I learned that hot, sticky Alabama summer night in the library and during my interview with the defensive lineman Jason.

I am ready to talk about the writing practices of our student-athletes.

To ground this book, I focus specifically on football and men's basketball because, as I argue throughout these pages, the student-athletes competing in these sports operate within a highly discursive space most evident in how they engage with scripted plays. I define scripted plays in the next chapter; however, to start, I understand scripted plays as multimodal texts created, implemented, and even curated with the public performing body as the central mode of meaning making. Other sports use scripted plays, but for football and men's basketball, most, if not all, of the bodily public action is undergirded by scripted plays. In articulating the writing practices of our student-athletes, then, I begin with a focus on plays. Plays are textual gateways into understanding how student-athletes know.

Starting with this premise, my proceeding inquiry is threefold: What are plays and what do they do? How do student-athletes learn plays? And, finally, how can we better teach student-athletes based on these findings? These three questions constitute the aims of the following chapters and culminate in a single query that has dogged me since my time working with first-year student-athletes at Auburn: how do student-athletes know?

In The Embodied Playbook: Writing Practices of Student-Athletes, I seek to understand better the Treys and Jasons many of us teach. According to the NCAA Sports Sponsorship and Participation Rates Report (National Collegiate Athletic Association 2017b), 491,930 student-athletes competed in NCAA sponsored sports during the 2016–2017 academic year. The total student-athlete population has grown 19 percent over the last decade. I can only imagine the numbers will continue rising. The close to one-half million student-athletes have a unique story to tell. Their story will illuminate not only how we approach literacy instruction and theory but also how we approach the most lucrative extracurricular appendage of US higher education: college sports. First, however, we need to look behind the headlines and the ESPN news blips about the wonders and worries of college sports to listen and learn. I can't help but wonder whether Trey, like Jason, might have stayed at Auburn, might have celebrated the national championship with his teammates if I, or the larger composition studies community, knew more about how student-athletes know.. More important, he might have graduated. Certainly many factors drive retention — still, what if?

THE ANTAGONISTIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ATHLETICS AND ACADEMICS

In this book, I take this nagging personal question and broaden it to speak to the many institutional and community stakeholders who work with our student-athletes. My personal what if question then becomes how do student-athletes know? And how can we better support their writing development based on what they know? Though my focus is on student-athletes' writing practices, I am aware that when I step into the waters of student-athletes and academics, I am also stepping into rolling waves of frustration at college athletics for soaring expenditures, countless scandals, and what many perceive to be either a blatant disregard for or an insouciant approach to academic standards. I acknowledge these soaring financial expenditures and scandals and touch on the historically antagonistic relationship between school and sport later in this section.

According to Forbes, the five most lucrative college football teams are all worth more than $100 million each, with the University of Texas at Austin leading the way at $131 million (Smith 2014). I spent four years working in athletic academic services at the University of Oklahoma. The athletics department operates with a roughly $100 million self-sustaining annual budget. Other sports are financially viable because of the revenue generated by football. According to 2012–2013 records, the Oklahoma football team brought in 34 percent of the revenue, with an expense of roughly 25 percent of the budget (University of Oklahoma 2013). At the Division I level, men's basketball programs also commonly operate in the black even though the sport does not generate such high dollars. Forbes reports that the University of Louisville has the most valuable team at just under $40 million, with the University of Kansas coming in second. Kansas generated $14.5 million alone from ticket sales (Smith 2015).

Broadcast rights also drive the revenue for football and men's basketball though administrators are often hesitant to disclose specific numbers. The SEC — a conference that claimed seven straight football national championships between 2006 and 2012 — partnered with ESPN in 2014 to launch the SEC Network. One year after the launch, the SEC announced a record distribution of $455.8 million divided among the fourteen conference schools. Then-commissioner of the SEC, Mike Slive, would not say how much of that revenue stemmed from the ESPN partnership; however, the previous year, the SEC distributed just $292.8 million. The SEC isn't the first to nuzzle up to a network in hopes of a richer payday. Notre Dame has long worked with NBC, which holds broadcast rights for Notre Dame football. This deal brings in around $20 million annually (the exact number is hard to locate because Notre Dame, a private school, does not always disclose financial records). Texas launched the Longhorn Network with ESPN in 2011; the Big Ten started the Big Ten Network. The NCAA, too, generates the majority of its revenue from television deals. According to a 2015 independent consolidated financial report disclosed by the NCAA, the NCAA generated over $776 million from "television and marketing rights fees," the majority coming from the Division I men's basketball tournament under contract with CBS/Turner (National Collegiate Athletics Association and Subsidiaries 2015). These are the numbers that jump out at us and that we remember when talk turns to college athletics even though more student-athletes compete in Division II and III — not high-dollar and high-profile Division I sports — and even though more athletics programs have modest budgets and operate in the black than have budgets near $100 million and operate in the red. In this book, I move from big-time Division I athletics at the University of Oklahoma to small-scale Division II athletics at the University of North Georgia. I move from an athletics program with an annual self-sustaining budget of roughly $100 million to an athletics program with a budget of roughly $3 million supported, in part, by mandatory student fees. College athletics takes on many forms across US higher education, and I want to be sensitive to the nuances of each program while also seeking to understand better how our student-athlete writers know and engage with text. However, I will say the soaring expenditures of sustaining a successful athletics program are realities affecting the everyday work of all stakeholders in US higher education. Like many, I am disheartened to read of mandatory student fees used to sustain floundering athletics departments, as is the case at Rutgers and other schools.

But I don't wade into a debate regarding the presence of college sports on our campuses. That debate is currently underway by scholars across various disciplines and is one certainly worth following. I tell a different story. I want to focus on the student-athletes who are already on our campuses, in our classrooms. I embrace Patricia Bizzell's (2014) powerful assertion that at the heart of composition studies is a desire to know who our students are (442). I want us to know our student-athletes. To know our student-athletes, we need to know their writing practices and broader literate practices.

I write aware of the task before me. Through nearly a decade of talking about my ideas at conferences, in journals, during hallway conversations, over coffee and other drinks, I'm aware many readers are indifferent to or outright hostile toward the uniquely US idea that an institution of higher education would funnel millions of dollars toward a game for students to play and fans to watch. I'm right there with those readers. Faculty are largely frustrated, baffled, incensed with, or ignorant of the presence and even need for college sports in higher education. These mixed but generally negative reactions to college sports on the part of faculty are steeped in historical tradition. Though Isocrates (1929) in his fourth-century BCE text Antidosis argued for the inclusion of a liberal arts education because it would fuse the mind and the body, historian of ancient Western education H. I. Marrou (1982) points out that when the Romans adopted Greek education, they jettisoned athletics (and music, oddly enough) from the curriculum. We see the remnants of such a decision today as public schools in times of tightening budgets are more inclined to drop PE and music than math and social studies. Yet sport bubbled up again in US higher education during the middle of the nineteenth century at the same time the abstract ideals of bettering oneself through education were codified into the rapid proliferation of brick-and-mortar colleges and universities. The presence and need for college sports on our campuses is strange indeed and, yes, may even vitiate the foundation of US higher education, which is and should be academics. Though I direct attention to how student-athletes engage with plays and do not descend into arguments for or against the presence of college sports on our campuses, sliding into activity theory just for a moment helps remind us that the objectives/motives of college sports (to generate income, to win games, to brand a university) cannot be separated from the tools (the plays, the players, the stadium, the coaches) used to reach these objectives/motives. So, yes, in a sense, when I talk about the tools of basketball and football, when I talk about the text in which these student-athletes engage, I am indirectly talking about the larger motives of college sports and the larger issues giving rise and continuing to give rise to the prominence of college sports on our campuses, sometimes to the detriment of learning. In this section, then, I offer a brief overview of our turbulent history with college sports, not to accuse or excuse college sports but to erect the complex stage on which the writing practices of our student-athletes are performed.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Embodied Playbook by J. Michael Rifenburg. Copyright © 2018 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Utah State Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2018
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1607326884
• ISBN 13: 9781607326885
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 174
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile