"Box Logic": Learning as Invention, Not Verification a.k.a. the Pedagogy of the Curio Cabinet

For the past several years, I've been infusing my writing and reading curriculum with visual art.  This choice was a natural progression from my decision to treat my student writers as artists and view every piece of writing as a collection of artistic choices.  

I am a poet and a teacher, and the way I had been teaching literacy had nothing to do with my lived experience as a writer.  In my class these days, we don't "finish" a lot of pieces.  But we share and develop, revise recursively and stretch for that one great image/idea/line/moment.  We may not remember all 17 rules of comma usage, but we know how to control the pace of a piece and how we want it to be read.  We are working toward what Geoffrey Sirc calls an everyday aesthetic, "bringing art consciousness to everyday life" (117), stumbling upon "interesting, quirky, small-t truths" (118)--also, box logic, learning as invention not verification (attributed to Greg Ulmer), and the pedagogy of the curio cabinet.

In his Writing New Media chapter "Box-Logic," Sirc applies this aesthetic in his composition classroom.  Following primarily the art of Joseph Cornell (although also citing Walter Benjamin and George Maciunas), Sirc suggests using digital spaces as Cornell used "boxes" to collect found objects that resonate with strong associations (both his and his audiences'):  meaning making in the third space.  In other words, the meaning of a work is derived from the associations arising from its organization or ordering of found objects, neither in the mind of the artist nor the viewer, but in a combination of both--the third space, or third mind. (Although I haven't read it, I'm told that  Inquiry Based English Instruction also describes this kind of approach to teaching literacy.)

In Sirc's composition classroom, students start collaborative collections on high interest topics--or as Sirc puts it those topics that are "suffused with fascination" (116)--particularly rap and hip hop in his most popular project.  They then work in research teams to collect images, audio files, and text-based artifacts related to their issue and annotate those artifacts, a process of "composition as craving" (117). Once the collection is compiled in a digital space (website/wiki/blog), patterns and supportable generalizations emerge.  Students can be assigned individual writing tasks that address more traditional analytical, narrative, or descriptive modes of writing. Along the way, Sirc embeds best practices in research. Writing traditional 'citational prose', he argues, is a natural progression from this research process.

Sirc adopts a critical stance in promoting this pedagogy:  "There's something increasingly untenable about the integrated coherence of college essayist prose, in which the easy falseness of a unified resolution gets prized over the richer, more difficult, de facto text the world presents itself as" (123).  In fact, Sirc argues that English teachers are like museum curators:  do the kinds of writing we include in our classrooms enshrine traditionally great works, or represent "a range of culturally valid forms" (126)?  This is of course, binary thinking--a false dichotomy.  We can do both, which Sirc almost acknowledges:  "...my challenge...is to have these young people burnish not anthologized writers' essays but their own forms of powerful pensee, while, certainly, at the same time learning some kind of basic prose styling to help them avoid verbal pitfalls in formal settings" (128).  I would argue that if Sirc really wants to raise his students' cultural and aesthetic capital, as he at one point contends, we may need to relax just a bit in our resistance to traditional forms.

In any case, here is a link to my example of a digital box collection as the beginning of a composition process. I intended to prove that the Disney Princesses were ruining my daughter's life, but I ended up reflecting on parenting.  The collecting process changed my direction.  Rick Beach has a clearer example of surveying how teachers are portrayed in Hollywood. His analysis is clearly more considered than mine and would better model possible analytical writing assignments for students.