January 6, 2022 • 45 mins
We talk to the editors of the student-run publication IMPRINT, Kealani Smith and Jarrett Webster, about topics related to their latest issue. We are also joined by UCF Department of Writing and Rhetoric Professors Dr. Sonia Arellano and Dr. Jamila Kareem to discuss their work and collaboration.
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(00:07):
Greetings and welcome to DWR - Discussions on Writing and Rhetoric, a space for informal conversations around research and practice in the field
at the university level. A place inclusive for curious novices, blossoming scholars, and seasoned academics to consider and share their inquiries, experiences and passions surrounding writing and rhetoric.
(00:29):
We are your hosts, professors Meeghan Faulconer and Nikolas Gardiakos, with the University of Central Florida.
Thank you for joining us.
Now let's get this conversation started.
Hi, and thanks for joining us.
Today we have undergraduate students here at University of Central Florida Jarrett Webster and Kealani Smith, as well as Dr.
(00:55):
Sonia Arellano and Dr. Jamila Kareem.
Recently, Jarrett and Kealani interviewed and did some focus work with Dr.
Kareem and Dr.
Arellano for the UCF publication Imprint in the Summer 2021 issue.
They are the co chief editors and we would like to talk to them a little bit today about the project that they were involved in.
(01:18):
Because not to be too much of a spoiler alert to those who haven't read the issue.
There seemed to be a moment of a real call to action where you both felt compelled to take this particular issue in a very specific direction.
So can you kind of talk to us about that for a little bit and give us some background? Yeah.
(01:38):
Yeah, so we started working on the magazine in Summer as two interns, and one of the ways that we were trying to find a theme for the issue was talking about some of the things that we had in common and that we thought were similar and kind of what kind of issue we wanted to create.
What impact do we want to leave on Imprint, so to speak? The imprint on Imprint? Yes.
(02:05):
And we found out that we both are in love with this anthology called this Bridge called My Back, edited and created by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa.
And so we decided to make the theme Voices of the Margins.
Yes.
So tell me, just really briefly, if you could describe Imprint to a listener who had no understanding of what that magazine what is Imprint? Imprint is a student run magazine and where we take stories from campus.
(02:38):
We take what's important to us and we just put it out there back to other students.
Is it a product of a particular part of UCF or is it open to the entire university? It's meant to be a student run magazine that's also funded or creates student works, so only students are able to actually write for the magazine and publish articles in the magazine.
(03:03):
And our mission for the issue is to evoke, embolden, and empower the students in the community at UCF.
So stories that do all three of those things are what we're trying to publish, but specifically in an area that we think matters a lot, which is social justice and social change.
So it then seems like a no brainer as to why you would decide to work with Dr.
(03:25):
Arellano and Dr.
Kareem.
Right, exactly.
Talk to us a little bit about that.
I love them.
What's not to love, really? Yeah.
I've taken both of them and they're both just so insightful when it comes to talking about culture and race and gender and class.
So it was really interesting to get to interview them, especially with, like, political and social climates now and get their perspective on what it means to be a colored person in the space of a big university.
(03:55):
Absolutely.
So, Dr. Arellano and Dr. Kareem, how did you feel when Kealani and Jarrett approached you about this idea? You want to take it? Yeah, I'll say first, I loved it because first I read one of Kealani's former publications and it just, oh, my gosh, had me in tears.
(04:20):
It really spoke to me.
And then I had Jarrett in a class as well.
And I recall teaching This Bridge Called My Back, and it really impacted him.
He expressed me.
It really impacted him.
And while, of course, part of what I do in my work is try to facilitate BIPOC students feelings of belonging in such a white space, but it's something different when you can also impact white students to think about marginalized voices and just other types of people.
(05:00):
I think that's also really impactful.
So I was really excited that both of them kind of took up this viewpoint to do some interviews about.
Yeah.
So I guess my initial reaction was similar.
I felt very excited because.
Like Dr.
Ariano said.
I did not did love I still love Kaylani's piece.
(05:23):
I'm Sorry I Made You Black.
Which was an imprint.
And I used it in my last two courses or some sections of it to have them really think about the rhetorical.
I guess properties or strategies of writing across different from a place of personal experience and then to connect that to connect your own personal self expression to broader issues and to broader topics.
(05:56):
But also to think about as a young black woman.
What does it mean to make those connections across race.
Class.
Gender difference and other in language differences? Even? So, I really was excited when I saw that it came from Kalani and not just from the piece.
(06:19):
I heard so much about it.
And I didn't have any experience working with Jarrett at that time, but from the email that he sent me and sort of a lot of the concepts that he proposed and then he sent over this really cool poem.
It's slipping my mind, but I did love it and I thought that was really cool that he really brought that to my attention.
(06:47):
And I'm lucky enough to have Kalani in class now, and I'm super excited because I had heard so much about her from other professors and other faculty in the department.
And so I felt great and humbled to have the opportunity to converse and to have the interview with both of these students, for sure.
(07:12):
I'm, like, sweating.
I didn't know any of that.
Can I just add one more thing? I feel like I hear different people all over, maybe on social media, maybe complain about students or say things that are not positive.
And I always think to myself, what students are you teaching? Because our students in VWR are really awesome.
(07:37):
And I think your work really demonstrates, I think what about our students inspires me as I think of myself at your age.
And I'm like, wow, I was not doing anything like this.
And so your work just really inspires me and gives me hope that young people are doing really impactful things.
(08:03):
Yeah, I agree.
I feel that way a lot as well.
Every semester I feel like a renewed sense of hope, I think is the right word that we see so much about people being disconnected and not being aware of what's happening in the world around them.
But I really don't think that that's necessarily the narrative.
And it's a disservice that that's the narrative that we keep hearing and seeing.
(08:27):
And that's why it's so important that we have these opportunities to have these discussions and shed light on the fact that, no, this is not the exception.
Yeah, I echo that.
And I just a question for the two student authors here.
What are some of those things, those internal motivations, those things that drive you when you're thinking about things to write about when you're observing the world? Could you talk to us a little bit about some of those things for you? Each of you, that kind of drive you? Yeah.
(09:02):
So when I took professional lives and literacy practices with Dr.
Ariano and we read through the anthology, I was enthralled by all the readings and I fell in love with a lot of the concepts.
We actually made a few of our articles that other students had published in imprint for that issue.
(09:22):
We made titles that were direct links and kind of Easter eggs almost to the anthology itself.
One person wrote about the deaf and hardened hearing community here at UCF and how there isn't a lot of support for them.
And the title of the article is Disability disability is not an Unnatural Disaster, which is an article that was published in the anthology, as invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster.
(09:51):
I think I work to realize that I am a white CIS male who has had a lot of privilege and a lot of advantages in life.
And so after reading that anthology and realizing that 50 years later we are still having the same conversations and still fighting the exact same fights, I think that my role as a publisher and editor and a writer is to create more spaces for other voices rather than taking the mic.
(10:20):
That was such a good answer.
I don't want to go after, I think a lot of the things that inspire me is challenging the idea of diversity because that's like a hot topic.
Everybody wants to be diverse, especially after what happens in 2020.
That's just something that everybody's striving for, not even in university, but in retailers and different companies across everywhere.
(10:43):
So I guess it's getting the student perspective, like, are we actually diverse? What is your experience? And putting that on blast because sometimes it can appear just like a front.
We just want to seem that way.
So just getting that actual experience is what really excites me.
To get people to come in and publish with us and hear them out.
(11:06):
Yeah, that's something that I took from the article with Dr.
Ariano, this idea of token diversity versus actual practice.
So amongst all of the guests, talk to us a little bit about what does that look like, what does that mean to you, what have your experience has been? I know there's one point in Dr.
(11:28):
Ariana's interview that I was getting emotional because I asked her.
Being a diversity pic is something that I'm personally really scared of.
Like, what if I get an interview one day as a person of color and I'm only there to check off a box? Or what if I'm in, like I look around, I'm the only brown person in my class or like in a company or at a table.
(11:48):
And she told me the undertone of being a diversity pick is that you are not qualified for that position.
And I swear, because I used to teach babies like dance, this is something that I would tell them even though they don't understand, is that you are qualified to be there and that even though you may check off a box, you have the qualifications, you are smart enough, you're educated enough to be in that space regardless of your a diversity peg.
(12:11):
So that's something I like still keep with me from Dr.
Ariana's interview and token diversity and things like that.
Well.
One thing that I think is part of my responsibility as.
Again.
This white person who inhabit spaces that are advantageous to myself.
(12:32):
I think my responsibility is to look around the room constantly and make sure that I'm not hogging the mic.
That I try and highlight other people's voices and see who's missing around the table before we engage in discussions about those specific groups of people.
Actually, I think about this a lot because I have these conversations with people, particularly across political parties or I guess political ideologies.
(13:02):
And one of the things I keep coming back to is that for me, it's not just about the people being in the room or being in the space, but it's also about allowing something right where it's also about appreciating, inviting, I guess maybe inviting, encouraging them to be their most authentic selves, obviously in the context of whatever space it is and understanding it's.
(13:35):
Like sort of like when we're talking to our students about rhetoric and language and thinking about their use of the terms like proper English.
And so I'm always questioning, what do you mean by proper English? And so they're like, well, you know, the time we learned in school, the standard, I'm like, but is it B standard or is it a standard? Right? So it's about really questioning like, okay, you've invited this black American person or this Latinx person or this Asian American person into this white space, but you're expecting them to, whether they want to or not, accommodate your standards of whiteness or standards of Eurocentrism for being in the world rather than trying to learn from them or collaborate across lines or that's just racial, right? If we're talking about people with disabilities, right? So the attitude is, well, there are less people with disabilities in our society, so they need to accommodate us rather than us learning from them and working with them.
(14:46):
And being an actual community is always about the dominant perspective, being accommodated and being assimilated into.
So I think for me.
An actual space of inclusion and equity really looks like or feels like a space where people from different experiences.
(15:08):
Different cultures.
Different ethnicities races.
All of the things come together and actually not expect a complete shift or a complete change.
But see the beauty and the honesty and the authenticity and the worthiness.
(15:31):
The value and the expression and the ways of being of people who are different from us.
So I think that for me, that's what it means.
Yeah, you all are so optimistic.
And not that I'm pessimistic, but I think that I don't know that actual diversity work is possible in the university, I think similar to how to other things, right? Because the institution itself was built upon a white middle class, upper middle class approach to life.
(16:10):
And so that can make it really difficult sometimes.
So I think that I see this in a different way sometimes.
I think about how my students success at the university is within a structure and a system that is evaluated according to white middle class parameters.
(16:32):
And so I think it makes it difficult, right, because we can be in the space, we can be heard in the space, but can we ever run the space? Can it be changed? And so I think similar to what Jamila was saying for me, she said that she thinks of us being able to be in a space and not have to change how we are, how we present ourselves to be comfortable in that space.
(17:02):
And for me, I think maybe it's a matter of changing this base to identify or to name how it's different.
So I think instead of saying, oh, I should be able to exist here and not have to accommodate anyone, what if the norm is that existence? Right? So I think there's a lot of changes that could and should be made to the university system because again, I think, yeah, it's great.
(17:31):
We're hired here as bypoc people we get to teach by park students.
It's amazing.
But simultaneously, our work is still somewhat peripheral or maybe not acknowledged in the same way, we still have to meet these certain parameters, these certain accolades, in order to advance or be considered successful.
(17:56):
So the parameters are still not set by us.
And that, to me, limits the possibilities.
I don't know that I believe anything radical can happen within academia.
I think that work happens in communities, but nevertheless, I still am hopeful.
Therefore, I'm here.
And I think our existence, dr.
(18:18):
Kareem, in academia is enough unsettling that I think that's successful in itself.
Can I just add to I love that you said that changing the space and then you said to bring about other possibilities.
And that, first of all, always gets to me thinking about Audrey Lords.
(18:41):
The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
It's like exactly what that is.
You can't work within a space that has been established for thousands of years in some way, shape or form, has evolved into this and then expect that it's completely going to change.
But also, you got me thinking about the fact that while these spaces actually remain the same and we are inviting people in, we won't ever be able to really imagine something other than what it is.
(19:16):
I mean, we'll be able to shift it and twist it and tweak it a little bit, but it's almost like it always bounces back to what it was originally.
So it's the whole two steps forward, five steps back.
Right? So it's like, yes, we are moving towards these initiatives of diversity and inclusion and equity, but not really, because it's like the insurance convergence theory of critical race theory, right? It's about like, yes, we want to support you and this equality, but as long as we still maintain the status quo.
(19:56):
So if you try to discuss that, you have to go away so far as it's beneficial for us.
Exactly.
The whole we want to move forward.
And I think that goes back to Megan's comments about the difference between saying we are anti racist, we value diversity and the practices.
And that is where probably most of us here in this interview see that disparity, right.
(20:22):
The actual everyday practices maybe aren't necessarily that at the university at least, because they're hard.
And yeah, people don't really always want I mean, they don't exactly know how to do the hard work.
Right? And they're maybe probably not going to the right sources.
And then when they're told the things to do, that is a lot more difficult than they probably expected.
(20:49):
Is this enough for me to be to me to not hate people of color? Like, it's a good start, but it only takes you so far.
I don't hate cats, but I also don't want them around me all the time.
Right.
So it's like, I'm not comparing those two things.
I'm just saying that not hating or the not disliking is just not what we're talking about.
(21:16):
And I think that when people come and say, okay, well, you need to check yourself every day.
You need to reinvent these practices or throw them out entirely and sink the ship and build a new ship.
Right? And I think you're right that academia will never do that.
At least I think not the next millennium.
(21:36):
I think we can really see evidence of that in the way things have evolved over the past two years.
We suddenly were thrown into lockdown.
We had to shift everything to entirely virtually.
And for some people, that was like, great.
Like, hey, we don't have to be on campus, or we don't have to be in the office.
We're working from home.
I'm in my pajamas.
(21:57):
I'm living my best life.
That was like a very small faction, though, of that population that was suddenly impacted.
You had a whole new uncharted sea of issues when it came to accessibility and inclusivity for a large amount of people that were already often marginalized.
And so we tried this experiment in terms of teaching online or working online, and it's debatable how successful it was, or maybe it was the best we could do at the time.
(22:28):
And here we are.
Like, I feel like right now we're in this place trying to reinvent.
How are we going to make this work moving forward? Because to go back to the cats out of the bag, here we are, in fact, conducting a meeting where half of you are not here, and it's working, but it's not necessarily ideal for everyone in every situation.
So I think that part of this, the invisible labor, is like, we don't know what it looks like to make it.
(22:57):
We have great ideas for what it should be, but the actual practice is still yet to be determined.
And I do think it's like, take a step forward, take two or three steps back.
We have people that were like, I am straight up not zooming for class anymore.
This is not tenable for me.
This is not the way I want to learn.
This is not the way I want to pay for tuition to be involved in this discussion.
(23:19):
And then you have other people that are like, I cannot be in these public spaces right now.
This is a threat to me and my health.
So, I mean, all err on the side of being optimistic, but I think that there's potential.
I think we're facing a lot of setbacks, though, and I think part of the problem is we don't even know what all of them are yet.
(23:39):
But I think that also leads me to another point that is worth maybe a little bit of discussion, is the idea of invisible labor for those that are doing this work in the classrooms, both as the facilitators and the students.
So could we talk about that a little bit? Could you clarify a brief example or something of what the invisible work here? Sure.
(24:02):
Feel free to jump in and correct me if I'm wrong here.
But when an issue of diversity or inclusion comes up amongst a group of colleagues or students.
It often falls upon the individuals of that group that are people of color.
People who are disabled to do the work of the explanation of the advocacy of making sure that it's an equitable thing for everyone and that adds labor to them.
(24:27):
That isn't necessarily it's not their role to do that work.
So that's what I'm getting at.
Do you want to add anything to that, Dr.
Anniano or Doctor Kareem? This reminds me of the chapter in this bridge called My Back that Jared mentioned.
Invisibility is not the rest of it.
(24:48):
Jared Invisibility is not an unnatural disaster.
Yes, not an unnatural disaster.
And her point in that piece is that it's carefully curated, right? Her silence is carefully curated by those around her.
And if you ask me, Megan, I think you're absolutely right.
I think people who already are marginalized in particular ways or struggle in particular ways have not been considered at all.
(25:16):
And I don't know that it's been intentional, but it definitely wasn't considered.
Right.
So I think to myself about and I talked about this in my interview with Kalani and Jarrett, but mothers, right? We all know the labor falls disproportionately on women and hetero couples, the labor of children and caretaking in general.
(25:39):
Right? And so that was something, when I was looking at jobs, was really important to me.
And not because I have children and not because I plan to have children, but simply because, to me, how the university accommodates and treats mothers demonstrates how they value the labor of women, particularly knowing that this disparity exists.
(26:03):
And so in my mind, I always think, like, put your money where your mouth is.
Do you all support working mothers, right.
So that women academics can be as successful as their male counterparts? And I think that's an area that is not considered by the university at large as much as it should be.
(26:25):
And then that's obviously demonstrated in our maternity and paternity leave.
But in addition to that, I think during covet, parents have experienced a particular type of hardship.
And I think that's something that was not on anyone's radar.
In my mind, I was like, yes, working from home, this is fantastic for me because it's just me and my partner and my dog and my cats, right? But I know other people who that was not the case for them.
(26:56):
And it was very stressful.
And I thought, oh, my God, no one is considering this about your particular situation.
And so back to thinking about Invisibility not being an unnatural disaster and thinking about what Jamila said, about thinking about not making accommodations for people with disabilities but making the norm be a way that includes them.
(27:23):
I think it's very similar in some of the hardships and the labor that people have experienced during COVID within academia that they just have not been considered.
Because if you think about the norm, what it is the norm, especially considering that academics believe in this personal professional split which has just been completely thrown out the window with Copid and moving to online teaching.
(27:50):
And so that's just one example in my mind.
I can think of people's different class status.
I can think of even, again, caretaking.
Right.
The people that they interact with, whether they live with children or they live with elderly people, whether they are immune compromised.
Like, there's a lot there that I think coven made it so that the university should have asked people more specifically about what they needed as far as workers and students go, and they just haven't.
(28:26):
And I think they've made assumptions one way and another where I think there's lots of people who do want to go back to face to face and there's lots of people who don't and are perfect, even students who are perfectly happy to take classes online.
That was a very long winded answer to just say, I agree.
I think that it has made some difficulties even more apparent.
(28:47):
Covet House yeah.
And kind of going off of that, but maybe going a little bit different way.
Thinking about invisible labor, I think that there's also the component of the emotional and psychological labor of being in a space where you feel like you have to constantly justify your presence and be representative of whatever it is.
(29:19):
I don't know if it's women, working class people, black Americans or just black people in general, whatever the case may be, where I think that there is some invisible labor there where you are feeling that I try to not do this to myself anymore.
(29:41):
I think you stop as you get older, but where you feel that you're representing more than just yourself.
And I think that can be laborious in and of itself.
And also.
(30:01):
I don't know if I would call this invisible labor.
But I think it qualifies and just the oh my gosh impact of the expectations of because in my case and I'm sure that doctor probably gets it sometimes too.
But when maybe something happens on a national scale or.
(30:26):
I don't know.
Somebody does something that sort of is like a social justice issue.
Like the expectation that you will always have a comment.
That you will always be representative of people who have something to say about that and that you will have a response.
And that impact of, I don't know, waking up in the morning and being like, okay, mentally prepared for people to ask you about this thing even though you have no time or energy to really process it and think about it right now.
(30:55):
So I think that there is comparing that to physical labor, it's like, okay, I'm expected to go lift this thing that I really have not prepared to do, but I know I'm going to have to do it.
So I don't know.
I think that it's a lot to carry around and that we expect that of going back to the Kova thing, right? We expect parents to just be like, okay, well, they're your kids, take care of them.
(31:21):
Why do you care that they're at home all the time? Like you had them and it's like, no, it's a lot.
It's a lot to do.
It's like the kids get away from the kids.
It's just a lot.
And yet you don't want them to get sick.
But there's also the reality of like, not everyone has a huge suburban house and I don't know, rural wherever or out in suburbia.
(31:48):
Some people are living in 600 sqft apartments with three kids and three adults and so it's not really understanding the context and then still expecting people to take on the labor because it feels natural, like, well, this is something that you do.
I think that's also a component of invisible labor, especially when it comes to social justice and yes, social change as well.
(32:22):
I know that.
I have a question for the two imprint editors here when it comes to talking about a lot of these kinds of issues of visibility and social justice issues within the publication of imprint.
What are the conversations that you have with other authors, people who submit, talking about making decisions of putting all those pieces together? Can you speak a little bit about what that process is like and what some of those conversations are about creating that sort of purpose and mission with the publication? Well, we like to identify what are you making a call to action for? Because we have these discussions regularly ever since going into lockdown, our differences, what we can do to make a change.
(33:11):
And it's one thing to say what is the issue at hand, and it's another thing to make an actionable step for us as students to give to one another.
Because us as students, we can't change the whole system that we're in.
We can only help one another and create that space for each other.
So that's something that we always talk about with writers.
Like, what can we do as the editors to facilitate that change with you? Yeah, a lot of people will address different social issues or kind of like communication issues that they may have with identities and cultures that they have.
(33:50):
And we always try to ask for proposed solutions in their conclusion.
What are some of these actionables that the readers can take and how can you benefit or progress with having read your article for this issue? We're trying to focus on the actual building of the bridge in terms of this bridge called My back.
(34:11):
We're trying to kind of relate everything is give us more of those actionables.
And another note that I think is important is the actionables don't have to be well thought through.
They don't have to be the perfect plan or the one that changes world hunger from being world hunger.
I think that my spouse has told me that in science, there's this narrative about the person who discovered hand washing.
(34:37):
The person who discovered hand washing just decided, maybe we'll do this.
And he implemented it into his facility because he found that many people were dying in child labor and that those numbers were really high.
So he said, what if we wash our hands between delivering babies? He implemented, all the deaths went down.
He wrote a paper about it and submitted it to researchers.
(34:58):
Everybody really killed him.
Everybody thought he was crazy.
Everybody thought he was absurd.
And it didn't happen for ten years.
For ten years after the discovery, hand washing was not official in facilities.
And I think that it identifies that.
You don't have to know what the solution is to start acting towards a solution.
Change can happen very minimally, and it can happen in an experiment.
(35:22):
So we don't have to know what the result is or how the solution can come about.
But trying anything is progress.
It seems like a solution to combat what can be exhaustive, right.
(35:55):
you can feel overwhelmed, and then knowing that you're going into combat these things on a daily basis and doing all that invisible labor in terms of, like, I have to advocate because I know better now.
It can feel like you're just taking from a well and just never refilling the well.
Right? So I think that it's a really smart decision to think of it in terms of what can I do today? And similarly to Dr.
(36:17):
Cream said, you reach a point where you have for self preservation, you have to say, okay, this is for me, what I need to take care of so that I can have my own sense of peace.
I find that so helpful because especially today, people just want to yell.
People just want to yell.
(36:37):
It's not solution oriented.
It's just I have something to say, I'm going to say it, and it doesn't matter what you think.
I'm just going to yell this opinion about out and, you know, take it and do what you will with it.
But I really love that solution oriented spin or twist? At the end, it looked like the people on Zoom wanted to say something.
I just love that because it falls in line with, I think, writing a rhetoric.
(37:03):
I think we are a problem solving, solution oriented field.
We see a problem, and we want to, and not necessarily a bad problem but how can something be improved? I feel like that is our orientation towards the things we study.
I'm actually going to take maybe not an opposite, but this time I'm going to be the pessimist.
(37:24):
Now I was actually thinking that the tolman I was just thinking of argument because you said everyone wants their point to just be heard and not hear other people.
And I think often ways that students think that they learn to write or at least use rhetoric, ethos, faith, those logos is by grandstanding their argument, their thesis, their evidence, their claims and not listening to others who completely disagree with them.
(37:54):
I think that not that we're completely responsible for it as a field, but I don't know, I would like to see more into solution based, maybe like Rogerian style, even outside of your centric epistemological ways of doing arguments.
Because I do think that even when I try to get students to think outside of that, you're not making an argument.
(38:18):
You are informing people.
You are telling them what you're just introducing them.
This is exploratory.
Most of them are very much like wanting to be argumentative, wanting to state this is a provable thing and here is all of the evidence that I'm gathering and this one source agrees with me, therefore I am correct.
(38:43):
Right.
So I feel like that is right.
That's on standardized test.
That's on my gosh.
Why can't I say Common Core? Thank you.
Okay.
Core curriculum.
But it didn't make sense.
But Common Core standards.
So I don't know, I think that the whole yelling at each other thing is maybe introduced through the education system and then through media, news media and things like that.
(39:14):
So yeah, I think that as I feel we have the potential and the tools to make the shift, I'm just not sure that we're doing that entirely.
Yeah.
There's your next paper.
How Public Education Creates Echo Chambers.
I think that's our next paper.
(39:37):
Our next a I want to share a quote actually from Dr.
Ariano's paper.
I can't remember who you wrote it with, but we read it.
Yes.
It is written with Milana Roberto at Oregon State.
Yeah, she's at Oregon State University.
(40:00):
Awesome.
The quote is in other words, when we share our stories, we understand how systems of oppression operate and we are then in a position to challenge those systems and advocate for political change.
So this was a quote from that piece that I really, really enjoyed and I thought that it was really important in terms of using the stories of the students to address some of these issues while they're still they're only solution oriented in the conclusion.
(40:29):
And I think that once they've shared their story, they put themselves in a credible position as well to also address potential solutions.
So I totally agree about the echo chambers and I think that there's a lot of grandstanding soapbox kind of arguments that get made and I think one of the ways that we as an issue.
Try to find our niche in terms of building those arguments is by sharing these stories as rhetorical arguments rather than backing it up with scholars and using them.
(40:57):
As your quote says.
To create a position of change.
Great.
Yeah.
Thanks so much for sharing that.
And I want to thank all of our guests for being here today.
We're closing in on our time for this episode, but I did have something I wanted to throw out to all of our guests here today, is just to ask them, what are you working on now? Or what's on the horizon or what are you excited about that's coming up for you? If you'd like to share some of that.
(41:27):
We're publishing.
So really quickly, before you go any further, how can our listeners find imprint, the imprint website? You can find it at readingandrhetric.
I want to say it's not imprintmagazine.
(41:48):
I'm sure also, if they Google UCF imprint, it should come up.
Okay.
So what are you publishing for this next issue? What's it about? We have a ton of different writers talking about anti racism.
We have pieces on disability, pieces on sexuality.
Jared and I are publishing another piece together about this podcast.
(42:10):
And we also have another introduction letter kind of from us, like a part two to the one in the first edition.
Awesome.
I submitted a couple of papers to use poetic instruction as a means of pedagogy to build literacy in other students.
Hopefully, those papers go through calling my term poetic literacy.
(42:32):
Officially, on this podcast, I heard of your first folks.
I am working on an article about Hispanics are in institutions.
Specifically, I did a research project on Hispanics Aren't Institutions in Florida, and hopefully the results will be turned into three articles or at least like a book chapter and an article.
(42:57):
But right now, this one is specifically looking at the institutional level and how well Hispanic survey institutions, at least the three that I looked at and as representations of Florida are doing in terms of serving the serving part of the Hispanic Serving Institutions because it really should be called Hispanic Enrolling Institutions.
(43:22):
But I was specifically looking at the ways that they fit into representing only institutional identities and institutional outcomes versus representing the multiple cultural nuances and practices and values of Latinx and Latin American communities and that attend their universities.
(43:48):
So, yeah, that's what I'm working on right now, and I'm hoping to submit it to one of the college English Fees comp studies.
But nobody is taking submissions right now, so I don't know, maybe it'll give me time to actually polish it.
But yeah, that's what I'm working on.
(44:09):
I just had a meeting this morning with the team that I'm starting to work with, eric House at New Mexico State University, charles McMarton and Tom Miller at University of Arizona.
We are putting together a book collection something along the lines of what the Pandemic has taught us about coalition and leadership.
(44:31):
So our framing is leadership and looking at everything from administration, students, communities, social justice movements, what is the panda Mike taught us in terms of leadership? So we were just getting that together, and that's what I'm working on right now.
(44:56):
Wonderful.
Well, we have so much exciting things to look forward to in the horizon.
And again, thank you all for joining us today.
Thank you for listening, and we look forward to seeing you next time for another discussion on writing and rhetoric.
Yeah.
Thanks, everyone.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you, guys.
Yay.
Greetings and welcome to DWR - Discussions on Writing and Rhetoric, a space for informal conversations around research and practice in the field
at the university level. A place inclusive for curious novices, blossoming scholars, and seasoned academics to consider and share their inquiries, experiences and passions surrounding writing and rhetoric.
(00:29):
We are your hosts, professors Meeghan Faulconer and Nikolas Gardiakos, with the University of Central Florida.
Thank you for joining us.
Now let's get this conversation started.
Hi, and thanks for joining us.
Today we have undergraduate students here at University of Central Florida Jarrett Webster and Kealani Smith, as well as Dr.
(00:55):
Sonia Arellano and Dr. Jamila Kareem.
Recently, Jarrett and Kealani interviewed and did some focus work with Dr.
Kareem and Dr.
Arellano for the UCF publication Imprint in the Summer 2021 issue.
They are the co chief editors and we would like to talk to them a little bit today about the project that they were involved in.
(01:18):
Because not to be too much of a spoiler alert to those who haven't read the issue.
There seemed to be a moment of a real call to action where you both felt compelled to take this particular issue in a very specific direction.
So can you kind of talk to us about that for a little bit and give us some background? Yeah.
(01:38):
Yeah, so we started working on the magazine in Summer as two interns, and one of the ways that we were trying to find a theme for the issue was talking about some of the things that we had in common and that we thought were similar and kind of what kind of issue we wanted to create.
What impact do we want to leave on Imprint, so to speak? The imprint on Imprint? Yes.
(02:05):
And we found out that we both are in love with this anthology called this Bridge called My Back, edited and created by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa.
And so we decided to make the theme Voices of the Margins.
Yes.
So tell me, just really briefly, if you could describe Imprint to a listener who had no understanding of what that magazine what is Imprint? Imprint is a student run magazine and where we take stories from campus.
(02:38):
We take what's important to us and we just put it out there back to other students.
Is it a product of a particular part of UCF or is it open to the entire university? It's meant to be a student run magazine that's also funded or creates student works, so only students are able to actually write for the magazine and publish articles in the magazine.
(03:03):
And our mission for the issue is to evoke, embolden, and empower the students in the community at UCF.
So stories that do all three of those things are what we're trying to publish, but specifically in an area that we think matters a lot, which is social justice and social change.
So it then seems like a no brainer as to why you would decide to work with Dr.
(03:25):
Arellano and Dr.
Kareem.
Right, exactly.
Talk to us a little bit about that.
I love them.
What's not to love, really? Yeah.
I've taken both of them and they're both just so insightful when it comes to talking about culture and race and gender and class.
So it was really interesting to get to interview them, especially with, like, political and social climates now and get their perspective on what it means to be a colored person in the space of a big university.
(03:55):
Absolutely.
So, Dr. Arellano and Dr. Kareem, how did you feel when Kealani and Jarrett approached you about this idea? You want to take it? Yeah, I'll say first, I loved it because first I read one of Kealani's former publications and it just, oh, my gosh, had me in tears.
(04:20):
It really spoke to me.
And then I had Jarrett in a class as well.
And I recall teaching This Bridge Called My Back, and it really impacted him.
He expressed me.
It really impacted him.
And while, of course, part of what I do in my work is try to facilitate BIPOC students feelings of belonging in such a white space, but it's something different when you can also impact white students to think about marginalized voices and just other types of people.
(05:00):
I think that's also really impactful.
So I was really excited that both of them kind of took up this viewpoint to do some interviews about.
Yeah.
So I guess my initial reaction was similar.
I felt very excited because.
Like Dr.
Ariano said.
I did not did love I still love Kaylani's piece.
(05:23):
I'm Sorry I Made You Black.
Which was an imprint.
And I used it in my last two courses or some sections of it to have them really think about the rhetorical.
I guess properties or strategies of writing across different from a place of personal experience and then to connect that to connect your own personal self expression to broader issues and to broader topics.
(05:56):
But also to think about as a young black woman.
What does it mean to make those connections across race.
Class.
Gender difference and other in language differences? Even? So, I really was excited when I saw that it came from Kalani and not just from the piece.
(06:19):
I heard so much about it.
And I didn't have any experience working with Jarrett at that time, but from the email that he sent me and sort of a lot of the concepts that he proposed and then he sent over this really cool poem.
It's slipping my mind, but I did love it and I thought that was really cool that he really brought that to my attention.
(06:47):
And I'm lucky enough to have Kalani in class now, and I'm super excited because I had heard so much about her from other professors and other faculty in the department.
And so I felt great and humbled to have the opportunity to converse and to have the interview with both of these students, for sure.
(07:12):
I'm, like, sweating.
I didn't know any of that.
Can I just add one more thing? I feel like I hear different people all over, maybe on social media, maybe complain about students or say things that are not positive.
And I always think to myself, what students are you teaching? Because our students in VWR are really awesome.
(07:37):
And I think your work really demonstrates, I think what about our students inspires me as I think of myself at your age.
And I'm like, wow, I was not doing anything like this.
And so your work just really inspires me and gives me hope that young people are doing really impactful things.
(08:03):
Yeah, I agree.
I feel that way a lot as well.
Every semester I feel like a renewed sense of hope, I think is the right word that we see so much about people being disconnected and not being aware of what's happening in the world around them.
But I really don't think that that's necessarily the narrative.
And it's a disservice that that's the narrative that we keep hearing and seeing.
(08:27):
And that's why it's so important that we have these opportunities to have these discussions and shed light on the fact that, no, this is not the exception.
Yeah, I echo that.
And I just a question for the two student authors here.
What are some of those things, those internal motivations, those things that drive you when you're thinking about things to write about when you're observing the world? Could you talk to us a little bit about some of those things for you? Each of you, that kind of drive you? Yeah.
(09:02):
So when I took professional lives and literacy practices with Dr.
Ariano and we read through the anthology, I was enthralled by all the readings and I fell in love with a lot of the concepts.
We actually made a few of our articles that other students had published in imprint for that issue.
(09:22):
We made titles that were direct links and kind of Easter eggs almost to the anthology itself.
One person wrote about the deaf and hardened hearing community here at UCF and how there isn't a lot of support for them.
And the title of the article is Disability disability is not an Unnatural Disaster, which is an article that was published in the anthology, as invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster.
(09:51):
I think I work to realize that I am a white CIS male who has had a lot of privilege and a lot of advantages in life.
And so after reading that anthology and realizing that 50 years later we are still having the same conversations and still fighting the exact same fights, I think that my role as a publisher and editor and a writer is to create more spaces for other voices rather than taking the mic.
(10:20):
That was such a good answer.
I don't want to go after, I think a lot of the things that inspire me is challenging the idea of diversity because that's like a hot topic.
Everybody wants to be diverse, especially after what happens in 2020.
That's just something that everybody's striving for, not even in university, but in retailers and different companies across everywhere.
(10:43):
So I guess it's getting the student perspective, like, are we actually diverse? What is your experience? And putting that on blast because sometimes it can appear just like a front.
We just want to seem that way.
So just getting that actual experience is what really excites me.
To get people to come in and publish with us and hear them out.
(11:06):
Yeah, that's something that I took from the article with Dr.
Ariano, this idea of token diversity versus actual practice.
So amongst all of the guests, talk to us a little bit about what does that look like, what does that mean to you, what have your experience has been? I know there's one point in Dr.
(11:28):
Ariana's interview that I was getting emotional because I asked her.
Being a diversity pic is something that I'm personally really scared of.
Like, what if I get an interview one day as a person of color and I'm only there to check off a box? Or what if I'm in, like I look around, I'm the only brown person in my class or like in a company or at a table.
(11:48):
And she told me the undertone of being a diversity pick is that you are not qualified for that position.
And I swear, because I used to teach babies like dance, this is something that I would tell them even though they don't understand, is that you are qualified to be there and that even though you may check off a box, you have the qualifications, you are smart enough, you're educated enough to be in that space regardless of your a diversity peg.
(12:11):
So that's something I like still keep with me from Dr.
Ariana's interview and token diversity and things like that.
Well.
One thing that I think is part of my responsibility as.
Again.
This white person who inhabit spaces that are advantageous to myself.
(12:32):
I think my responsibility is to look around the room constantly and make sure that I'm not hogging the mic.
That I try and highlight other people's voices and see who's missing around the table before we engage in discussions about those specific groups of people.
Actually, I think about this a lot because I have these conversations with people, particularly across political parties or I guess political ideologies.
(13:02):
And one of the things I keep coming back to is that for me, it's not just about the people being in the room or being in the space, but it's also about allowing something right where it's also about appreciating, inviting, I guess maybe inviting, encouraging them to be their most authentic selves, obviously in the context of whatever space it is and understanding it's.
(13:35):
Like sort of like when we're talking to our students about rhetoric and language and thinking about their use of the terms like proper English.
And so I'm always questioning, what do you mean by proper English? And so they're like, well, you know, the time we learned in school, the standard, I'm like, but is it B standard or is it a standard? Right? So it's about really questioning like, okay, you've invited this black American person or this Latinx person or this Asian American person into this white space, but you're expecting them to, whether they want to or not, accommodate your standards of whiteness or standards of Eurocentrism for being in the world rather than trying to learn from them or collaborate across lines or that's just racial, right? If we're talking about people with disabilities, right? So the attitude is, well, there are less people with disabilities in our society, so they need to accommodate us rather than us learning from them and working with them.
(14:46):
And being an actual community is always about the dominant perspective, being accommodated and being assimilated into.
So I think for me.
An actual space of inclusion and equity really looks like or feels like a space where people from different experiences.
(15:08):
Different cultures.
Different ethnicities races.
All of the things come together and actually not expect a complete shift or a complete change.
But see the beauty and the honesty and the authenticity and the worthiness.
(15:31):
The value and the expression and the ways of being of people who are different from us.
So I think that for me, that's what it means.
Yeah, you all are so optimistic.
And not that I'm pessimistic, but I think that I don't know that actual diversity work is possible in the university, I think similar to how to other things, right? Because the institution itself was built upon a white middle class, upper middle class approach to life.
(16:10):
And so that can make it really difficult sometimes.
So I think that I see this in a different way sometimes.
I think about how my students success at the university is within a structure and a system that is evaluated according to white middle class parameters.
(16:32):
And so I think it makes it difficult, right, because we can be in the space, we can be heard in the space, but can we ever run the space? Can it be changed? And so I think similar to what Jamila was saying for me, she said that she thinks of us being able to be in a space and not have to change how we are, how we present ourselves to be comfortable in that space.
(17:02):
And for me, I think maybe it's a matter of changing this base to identify or to name how it's different.
So I think instead of saying, oh, I should be able to exist here and not have to accommodate anyone, what if the norm is that existence? Right? So I think there's a lot of changes that could and should be made to the university system because again, I think, yeah, it's great.
(17:31):
We're hired here as bypoc people we get to teach by park students.
It's amazing.
But simultaneously, our work is still somewhat peripheral or maybe not acknowledged in the same way, we still have to meet these certain parameters, these certain accolades, in order to advance or be considered successful.
(17:56):
So the parameters are still not set by us.
And that, to me, limits the possibilities.
I don't know that I believe anything radical can happen within academia.
I think that work happens in communities, but nevertheless, I still am hopeful.
Therefore, I'm here.
And I think our existence, dr.
(18:18):
Kareem, in academia is enough unsettling that I think that's successful in itself.
Can I just add to I love that you said that changing the space and then you said to bring about other possibilities.
And that, first of all, always gets to me thinking about Audrey Lords.
(18:41):
The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
It's like exactly what that is.
You can't work within a space that has been established for thousands of years in some way, shape or form, has evolved into this and then expect that it's completely going to change.
But also, you got me thinking about the fact that while these spaces actually remain the same and we are inviting people in, we won't ever be able to really imagine something other than what it is.
(19:16):
I mean, we'll be able to shift it and twist it and tweak it a little bit, but it's almost like it always bounces back to what it was originally.
So it's the whole two steps forward, five steps back.
Right? So it's like, yes, we are moving towards these initiatives of diversity and inclusion and equity, but not really, because it's like the insurance convergence theory of critical race theory, right? It's about like, yes, we want to support you and this equality, but as long as we still maintain the status quo.
(19:56):
So if you try to discuss that, you have to go away so far as it's beneficial for us.
Exactly.
The whole we want to move forward.
And I think that goes back to Megan's comments about the difference between saying we are anti racist, we value diversity and the practices.
And that is where probably most of us here in this interview see that disparity, right.
(20:22):
The actual everyday practices maybe aren't necessarily that at the university at least, because they're hard.
And yeah, people don't really always want I mean, they don't exactly know how to do the hard work.
Right? And they're maybe probably not going to the right sources.
And then when they're told the things to do, that is a lot more difficult than they probably expected.
(20:49):
Is this enough for me to be to me to not hate people of color? Like, it's a good start, but it only takes you so far.
I don't hate cats, but I also don't want them around me all the time.
Right.
So it's like, I'm not comparing those two things.
I'm just saying that not hating or the not disliking is just not what we're talking about.
(21:16):
And I think that when people come and say, okay, well, you need to check yourself every day.
You need to reinvent these practices or throw them out entirely and sink the ship and build a new ship.
Right? And I think you're right that academia will never do that.
At least I think not the next millennium.
(21:36):
I think we can really see evidence of that in the way things have evolved over the past two years.
We suddenly were thrown into lockdown.
We had to shift everything to entirely virtually.
And for some people, that was like, great.
Like, hey, we don't have to be on campus, or we don't have to be in the office.
We're working from home.
I'm in my pajamas.
(21:57):
I'm living my best life.
That was like a very small faction, though, of that population that was suddenly impacted.
You had a whole new uncharted sea of issues when it came to accessibility and inclusivity for a large amount of people that were already often marginalized.
And so we tried this experiment in terms of teaching online or working online, and it's debatable how successful it was, or maybe it was the best we could do at the time.
(22:28):
And here we are.
Like, I feel like right now we're in this place trying to reinvent.
How are we going to make this work moving forward? Because to go back to the cats out of the bag, here we are, in fact, conducting a meeting where half of you are not here, and it's working, but it's not necessarily ideal for everyone in every situation.
So I think that part of this, the invisible labor, is like, we don't know what it looks like to make it.
(22:57):
We have great ideas for what it should be, but the actual practice is still yet to be determined.
And I do think it's like, take a step forward, take two or three steps back.
We have people that were like, I am straight up not zooming for class anymore.
This is not tenable for me.
This is not the way I want to learn.
This is not the way I want to pay for tuition to be involved in this discussion.
(23:19):
And then you have other people that are like, I cannot be in these public spaces right now.
This is a threat to me and my health.
So, I mean, all err on the side of being optimistic, but I think that there's potential.
I think we're facing a lot of setbacks, though, and I think part of the problem is we don't even know what all of them are yet.
(23:39):
But I think that also leads me to another point that is worth maybe a little bit of discussion, is the idea of invisible labor for those that are doing this work in the classrooms, both as the facilitators and the students.
So could we talk about that a little bit? Could you clarify a brief example or something of what the invisible work here? Sure.
(24:02):
Feel free to jump in and correct me if I'm wrong here.
But when an issue of diversity or inclusion comes up amongst a group of colleagues or students.
It often falls upon the individuals of that group that are people of color.
People who are disabled to do the work of the explanation of the advocacy of making sure that it's an equitable thing for everyone and that adds labor to them.
(24:27):
That isn't necessarily it's not their role to do that work.
So that's what I'm getting at.
Do you want to add anything to that, Dr.
Anniano or Doctor Kareem? This reminds me of the chapter in this bridge called My Back that Jared mentioned.
Invisibility is not the rest of it.
(24:48):
Jared Invisibility is not an unnatural disaster.
Yes, not an unnatural disaster.
And her point in that piece is that it's carefully curated, right? Her silence is carefully curated by those around her.
And if you ask me, Megan, I think you're absolutely right.
I think people who already are marginalized in particular ways or struggle in particular ways have not been considered at all.
(25:16):
And I don't know that it's been intentional, but it definitely wasn't considered.
Right.
So I think to myself about and I talked about this in my interview with Kalani and Jarrett, but mothers, right? We all know the labor falls disproportionately on women and hetero couples, the labor of children and caretaking in general.
(25:39):
Right? And so that was something, when I was looking at jobs, was really important to me.
And not because I have children and not because I plan to have children, but simply because, to me, how the university accommodates and treats mothers demonstrates how they value the labor of women, particularly knowing that this disparity exists.
(26:03):
And so in my mind, I always think, like, put your money where your mouth is.
Do you all support working mothers, right.
So that women academics can be as successful as their male counterparts? And I think that's an area that is not considered by the university at large as much as it should be.
(26:25):
And then that's obviously demonstrated in our maternity and paternity leave.
But in addition to that, I think during covet, parents have experienced a particular type of hardship.
And I think that's something that was not on anyone's radar.
In my mind, I was like, yes, working from home, this is fantastic for me because it's just me and my partner and my dog and my cats, right? But I know other people who that was not the case for them.
(26:56):
And it was very stressful.
And I thought, oh, my God, no one is considering this about your particular situation.
And so back to thinking about Invisibility not being an unnatural disaster and thinking about what Jamila said, about thinking about not making accommodations for people with disabilities but making the norm be a way that includes them.
(27:23):
I think it's very similar in some of the hardships and the labor that people have experienced during COVID within academia that they just have not been considered.
Because if you think about the norm, what it is the norm, especially considering that academics believe in this personal professional split which has just been completely thrown out the window with Copid and moving to online teaching.
(27:50):
And so that's just one example in my mind.
I can think of people's different class status.
I can think of even, again, caretaking.
Right.
The people that they interact with, whether they live with children or they live with elderly people, whether they are immune compromised.
Like, there's a lot there that I think coven made it so that the university should have asked people more specifically about what they needed as far as workers and students go, and they just haven't.
(28:26):
And I think they've made assumptions one way and another where I think there's lots of people who do want to go back to face to face and there's lots of people who don't and are perfect, even students who are perfectly happy to take classes online.
That was a very long winded answer to just say, I agree.
I think that it has made some difficulties even more apparent.
(28:47):
Covet House yeah.
And kind of going off of that, but maybe going a little bit different way.
Thinking about invisible labor, I think that there's also the component of the emotional and psychological labor of being in a space where you feel like you have to constantly justify your presence and be representative of whatever it is.
(29:19):
I don't know if it's women, working class people, black Americans or just black people in general, whatever the case may be, where I think that there is some invisible labor there where you are feeling that I try to not do this to myself anymore.
(29:41):
I think you stop as you get older, but where you feel that you're representing more than just yourself.
And I think that can be laborious in and of itself.
And also.
(30:01):
I don't know if I would call this invisible labor.
But I think it qualifies and just the oh my gosh impact of the expectations of because in my case and I'm sure that doctor probably gets it sometimes too.
But when maybe something happens on a national scale or.
(30:26):
I don't know.
Somebody does something that sort of is like a social justice issue.
Like the expectation that you will always have a comment.
That you will always be representative of people who have something to say about that and that you will have a response.
And that impact of, I don't know, waking up in the morning and being like, okay, mentally prepared for people to ask you about this thing even though you have no time or energy to really process it and think about it right now.
(30:55):
So I think that there is comparing that to physical labor, it's like, okay, I'm expected to go lift this thing that I really have not prepared to do, but I know I'm going to have to do it.
So I don't know.
I think that it's a lot to carry around and that we expect that of going back to the Kova thing, right? We expect parents to just be like, okay, well, they're your kids, take care of them.
(31:21):
Why do you care that they're at home all the time? Like you had them and it's like, no, it's a lot.
It's a lot to do.
It's like the kids get away from the kids.
It's just a lot.
And yet you don't want them to get sick.
But there's also the reality of like, not everyone has a huge suburban house and I don't know, rural wherever or out in suburbia.
(31:48):
Some people are living in 600 sqft apartments with three kids and three adults and so it's not really understanding the context and then still expecting people to take on the labor because it feels natural, like, well, this is something that you do.
I think that's also a component of invisible labor, especially when it comes to social justice and yes, social change as well.
(32:22):
I know that.
I have a question for the two imprint editors here when it comes to talking about a lot of these kinds of issues of visibility and social justice issues within the publication of imprint.
What are the conversations that you have with other authors, people who submit, talking about making decisions of putting all those pieces together? Can you speak a little bit about what that process is like and what some of those conversations are about creating that sort of purpose and mission with the publication? Well, we like to identify what are you making a call to action for? Because we have these discussions regularly ever since going into lockdown, our differences, what we can do to make a change.
(33:11):
And it's one thing to say what is the issue at hand, and it's another thing to make an actionable step for us as students to give to one another.
Because us as students, we can't change the whole system that we're in.
We can only help one another and create that space for each other.
So that's something that we always talk about with writers.
Like, what can we do as the editors to facilitate that change with you? Yeah, a lot of people will address different social issues or kind of like communication issues that they may have with identities and cultures that they have.
(33:50):
And we always try to ask for proposed solutions in their conclusion.
What are some of these actionables that the readers can take and how can you benefit or progress with having read your article for this issue? We're trying to focus on the actual building of the bridge in terms of this bridge called My back.
(34:11):
We're trying to kind of relate everything is give us more of those actionables.
And another note that I think is important is the actionables don't have to be well thought through.
They don't have to be the perfect plan or the one that changes world hunger from being world hunger.
I think that my spouse has told me that in science, there's this narrative about the person who discovered hand washing.
(34:37):
The person who discovered hand washing just decided, maybe we'll do this.
And he implemented it into his facility because he found that many people were dying in child labor and that those numbers were really high.
So he said, what if we wash our hands between delivering babies? He implemented, all the deaths went down.
He wrote a paper about it and submitted it to researchers.
(34:58):
Everybody really killed him.
Everybody thought he was crazy.
Everybody thought he was absurd.
And it didn't happen for ten years.
For ten years after the discovery, hand washing was not official in facilities.
And I think that it identifies that.
You don't have to know what the solution is to start acting towards a solution.
Change can happen very minimally, and it can happen in an experiment.
(35:22):
So we don't have to know what the result is or how the solution can come about.
But trying anything is progress.
It seems like a solution to combat what can be exhaustive, right.
(35:55):
you can feel overwhelmed, and then knowing that you're going into combat these things on a daily basis and doing all that invisible labor in terms of, like, I have to advocate because I know better now.
It can feel like you're just taking from a well and just never refilling the well.
Right? So I think that it's a really smart decision to think of it in terms of what can I do today? And similarly to Dr.
(36:17):
Cream said, you reach a point where you have for self preservation, you have to say, okay, this is for me, what I need to take care of so that I can have my own sense of peace.
I find that so helpful because especially today, people just want to yell.
People just want to yell.
(36:37):
It's not solution oriented.
It's just I have something to say, I'm going to say it, and it doesn't matter what you think.
I'm just going to yell this opinion about out and, you know, take it and do what you will with it.
But I really love that solution oriented spin or twist? At the end, it looked like the people on Zoom wanted to say something.
I just love that because it falls in line with, I think, writing a rhetoric.
(37:03):
I think we are a problem solving, solution oriented field.
We see a problem, and we want to, and not necessarily a bad problem but how can something be improved? I feel like that is our orientation towards the things we study.
I'm actually going to take maybe not an opposite, but this time I'm going to be the pessimist.
(37:24):
Now I was actually thinking that the tolman I was just thinking of argument because you said everyone wants their point to just be heard and not hear other people.
And I think often ways that students think that they learn to write or at least use rhetoric, ethos, faith, those logos is by grandstanding their argument, their thesis, their evidence, their claims and not listening to others who completely disagree with them.
(37:54):
I think that not that we're completely responsible for it as a field, but I don't know, I would like to see more into solution based, maybe like Rogerian style, even outside of your centric epistemological ways of doing arguments.
Because I do think that even when I try to get students to think outside of that, you're not making an argument.
(38:18):
You are informing people.
You are telling them what you're just introducing them.
This is exploratory.
Most of them are very much like wanting to be argumentative, wanting to state this is a provable thing and here is all of the evidence that I'm gathering and this one source agrees with me, therefore I am correct.
(38:43):
Right.
So I feel like that is right.
That's on standardized test.
That's on my gosh.
Why can't I say Common Core? Thank you.
Okay.
Core curriculum.
But it didn't make sense.
But Common Core standards.
So I don't know, I think that the whole yelling at each other thing is maybe introduced through the education system and then through media, news media and things like that.
(39:14):
So yeah, I think that as I feel we have the potential and the tools to make the shift, I'm just not sure that we're doing that entirely.
Yeah.
There's your next paper.
How Public Education Creates Echo Chambers.
I think that's our next paper.
(39:37):
Our next a I want to share a quote actually from Dr.
Ariano's paper.
I can't remember who you wrote it with, but we read it.
Yes.
It is written with Milana Roberto at Oregon State.
Yeah, she's at Oregon State University.
(40:00):
Awesome.
The quote is in other words, when we share our stories, we understand how systems of oppression operate and we are then in a position to challenge those systems and advocate for political change.
So this was a quote from that piece that I really, really enjoyed and I thought that it was really important in terms of using the stories of the students to address some of these issues while they're still they're only solution oriented in the conclusion.
(40:29):
And I think that once they've shared their story, they put themselves in a credible position as well to also address potential solutions.
So I totally agree about the echo chambers and I think that there's a lot of grandstanding soapbox kind of arguments that get made and I think one of the ways that we as an issue.
Try to find our niche in terms of building those arguments is by sharing these stories as rhetorical arguments rather than backing it up with scholars and using them.
(40:57):
As your quote says.
To create a position of change.
Great.
Yeah.
Thanks so much for sharing that.
And I want to thank all of our guests for being here today.
We're closing in on our time for this episode, but I did have something I wanted to throw out to all of our guests here today, is just to ask them, what are you working on now? Or what's on the horizon or what are you excited about that's coming up for you? If you'd like to share some of that.
(41:27):
We're publishing.
So really quickly, before you go any further, how can our listeners find imprint, the imprint website? You can find it at readingandrhetric.
I want to say it's not imprintmagazine.
(41:48):
I'm sure also, if they Google UCF imprint, it should come up.
Okay.
So what are you publishing for this next issue? What's it about? We have a ton of different writers talking about anti racism.
We have pieces on disability, pieces on sexuality.
Jared and I are publishing another piece together about this podcast.
(42:10):
And we also have another introduction letter kind of from us, like a part two to the one in the first edition.
Awesome.
I submitted a couple of papers to use poetic instruction as a means of pedagogy to build literacy in other students.
Hopefully, those papers go through calling my term poetic literacy.
(42:32):
Officially, on this podcast, I heard of your first folks.
I am working on an article about Hispanics are in institutions.
Specifically, I did a research project on Hispanics Aren't Institutions in Florida, and hopefully the results will be turned into three articles or at least like a book chapter and an article.
(42:57):
But right now, this one is specifically looking at the institutional level and how well Hispanic survey institutions, at least the three that I looked at and as representations of Florida are doing in terms of serving the serving part of the Hispanic Serving Institutions because it really should be called Hispanic Enrolling Institutions.
(43:22):
But I was specifically looking at the ways that they fit into representing only institutional identities and institutional outcomes versus representing the multiple cultural nuances and practices and values of Latinx and Latin American communities and that attend their universities.
(43:48):
So, yeah, that's what I'm working on right now, and I'm hoping to submit it to one of the college English Fees comp studies.
But nobody is taking submissions right now, so I don't know, maybe it'll give me time to actually polish it.
But yeah, that's what I'm working on.
(44:09):
I just had a meeting this morning with the team that I'm starting to work with, eric House at New Mexico State University, charles McMarton and Tom Miller at University of Arizona.
We are putting together a book collection something along the lines of what the Pandemic has taught us about coalition and leadership.
(44:31):
So our framing is leadership and looking at everything from administration, students, communities, social justice movements, what is the panda Mike taught us in terms of leadership? So we were just getting that together, and that's what I'm working on right now.
(44:56):
Wonderful.
Well, we have so much exciting things to look forward to in the horizon.
And again, thank you all for joining us today.
Thank you for listening, and we look forward to seeing you next time for another discussion on writing and rhetoric.
Yeah.
Thanks, everyone.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you, guys.
Yay.
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