WP4 (340): The Knowledgable and Free Writing
In the study of WRIT 340 this semester, writing provides my initially simple ideas with specific academic knowledge and established a theoretical system to help me convey the purpose more effectively. What’s more valuable is that Prof. D’s advanced education method gives me sufficient autonomy to perform, thereby establishing a conversational teacher-student relationship with me and allowing me to write more freely.
First of all, writing can provide a more academic explanation for my daily-life thinking and establish a complete framework, thereby helping me to convey ideas more clearly. When I usually talk about a topic in general, the seemingly “big” talks are actually superficial and repetitive, because I haven’t put enough thought into it. However, when I need to explain these ideas into written words, they become accurate and rigorous, because the words are preserved and circulated among others for interpretation. Thus, in this process of writing, I need to use plenty of academic theories and other credible sources to ensure that my ideas are accurately communicated and supported. The reason why idea matters is: the idea is the purpose of my writing, and it is also the main body that readers can resonate with because no one can completely feel the otherwise shared personal experiences and stories. At the same time, after a semester of knowledge collection and writing exercises, I am pleasantly surprised to find that a relatively complete theoretical system can be derived from these sources. In other words, writing about a topic (to me it is culture) gives me a clear understanding of its academic origin and development, thereby establishing a complete knowledge system and allowing me to better connect the writing logic between projects.
For example, I have always been interested in the viral spread of Tik-Tok but I do not know how and why it precisely influences people. However, the completion of three writing projects has allowed me to understand the profound mechanism behind popular culture and the actions I need to take in the future to counter it. Specifically, in the past, I would only say: “This is not good. We should not watch Tik-Tok. Indulging in cultural fast food will erode our brain.” However, in WP1, I study the composition of culture, its hegemony and plurality; In WP2, I use the role of medium to explain the harm of homogeneous cultural products; finally, in WP3, I put forward the view of the cultural cage and use the theory of subculture to show “there always exists room for people to create new meanings under the hegemony and generate the subculture to overthrow the hegemonic culture.” Compared with my original clichés, the academic corridors I established using authoritative scholars such as Raymond Williams, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault are much more credible. In this way, with professional knowledge and a complete theoretical system, I can better explain and deliver my ideas.
It is worth mentioning that I believe that my growth in WRIT 340 is more profound and reflective than that in WRIT 150. Unlike the multi-dimensional thesis of humbleness, inferior complex, and social solicitude in the WP3 of WRIT 150, my WP3 this semester mainly focuses on the thesis of popular culture and strives to dig out the deepest analysis. In the words of my sociology professor, if the former is a pizza covered with various ingredients, the latter is an ice cream that focuses on depth and level, which uses sufficient materials to elaborate an issue as much as possible, so that readers can better understand the complex points of view.
Secondly, WRIT 340 has cultivated my spirit of writing freely and resisting being oppressed by authority. As I discussed in WP3, Foucault and Freire both consider “power as a set of relations that try to subject human individuals to certain rules (patterns) to which they then comply”. Over time, people gradually internalize the indoctrinated ideas and accept them as reasonable default rules, thus being completely controlled by authority.
To a certain extent, universities and elitist education are one of the most obvious places where authority exists. For example, as I wrote in Post 1 and Post 3 that standardized tests such as SAT and GRE are essentially discriminative:
“Prominent American universities and the U.S. educational system utilize standardized tests to filter and select wealthy and white students as a way to uphold their elitism while considering other students as relatively ‘secondary’”.
Such a system ensures the white upper-class screens out a considerable part of non-white poor students externally. At the same time, internally, the universities also have many policies that “oppress” students, such as the minimum GPA to graduate, mandatory attendance, and some teachers’ requirement of having international students participate in online classes under the U.S. time zone.
Fortunately, in WRIT 340, Prof. D does not oppress us, letting us write “the imposition of one individual’s choice upon another”, but cultivate our independent and free spirit (Freire 2014: 47). He breaks these traditional rules and puts the autonomy that should have belonged to college students in our hands: let us decide the topics to be written, and even the rubric for scoring was completely drafted by us. Such a way of “[speaking] a true word is to transform the world”, is to use free and emancipated education to create an equal society (ibid: 87).
At the same time, the pedagogy of Prof. D also reminds me of the discussion about subculture in WP3. If the mainstream traditional education is a kind of culture, then Prof. D’s method of breaking the rules is a subculture, a way of “[breaking] the normal meanings of everyday symbols and reclaim new cultural elements”. For example, he gives the traditional concepts of “class”, “workshop” and “grade” brand new meanings: the class becomes a truly open space for brave discussions, workshopping in groups is private and effective, while the grades are determined upon student-drafted rubrics. Consequently, Prof. D allows these “language” (words) to become “ideology”, which will gradually affect more and more students, and replace traditional ideas to create an autonomous and free educational environment.
To conclude, the class of WRIT340 has facilitated me one step further to become a true writer: I learn how to use academic resources to supplement my personal opinion, and at the same time I realize that genuinely good writing should be free and independent. Therefore, I am very grateful to Prof. D for his help in both WRIT150 and WRIT 340; without his guidance, I still do not even know what “idea-driven writing” is. In future writing, I will make full use of these valuable learning experiences and share this liberating pedagogy with peers around me so that it can continue and spread throughout our society.
References
Zikang, Hou. 2021. “Post 3(340): About Standardized Tests Part 2”. Medium. Retrieve at: https://medium.com/writ340-summer2021/post-3-340-about-standardized-tests-part-2-d6a610625879
Zikang, Hou. 2021. “WP3(340): The Cage of Popular Culture”. Medium. Retrieve at: https://medium.com/writ340-summer2021/wp3-the-cage-of-popular-culture-97614295ddb4
