Review
Manuscript prepared for Digital
Rhetoric Collaborative, an imprint of Michigan
Publishing. 
In this behind the scenes documentary, we tell stories of the messy, evolving process of making this book. In this way, we aim to highlight how 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy reflects the influence of our own embodied, limited worldviews, as well as the influence of the nonhuman actors (places, technologies, cats) that have shaped our work. Shot over a weekend in the historic Chase School (otherwise known as the condo building in which Jason resides), this documentary engages four key questions about the making of this project: 1) How did this project begin? 2) What places have shaped our collaboration? 3) Why do we love the English Journal archive? 4) What are the key takeaways of the book?
Behind the Scenes (.txt version)
[Main theme music]
Jason: This project really arises from the cut scenes of Remixing Composition, my first book. And as I was working on that project, I kept on coming across all these articles in the English Journal archived on JSTOR, dating way back to the 30s about media pedagogy. But it was just way too much stuff to wrap my head around on my timeline, and I was also using a case study methodology that meant that I really could only focus on a few texts in detail. So I left it behind, but something about the English Journal archive lingered with me, and I eventually realized that if I wanted to do something with it, I really needed a collaborator—I needed somebody who would read all this stuff with me and help me figure out a methodology to make sense of it. And so I thought around, who are the nerds in the field who would be willing to read a bunch of old stuff with me and play around? And there was really only one person—and that person was Warren Benson McCorkle, Jr.
Ben: This project really got started when Jason came to me with this cockamamie idea of looking back at this really old archive of English Journal. It started in 1912, and he said people aren't really looking at this particularly when it comes to how people are using technology in the classroom. And he and I both, I think, were wanting to scratch the same itch. We wanted to explore this idea of telling history in new ways. And maybe in multiple ways. And maybe sometimes in contradictory ways. And I think we both kind of picked up on that impulse, and we said, "Yeah, let's do it."
Jason: I started by just saying we're gonna read 50 years, maybe write a couple articles. I honestly believe that at the time, but now we are here. And the rest is history, as they say...
[Main theme music]
Ben: The work happens in a lot of different places. And now that I'm thinking about it, it becomes really apparent how pervasive this whole project is.
Jason: The bulk of the work gets done in virtual spaces. I think from its very inception this project has lived in Google Drive and over time it's also to come to live in Dropbox...
Ben: Google Docs, Dropbox, periodically Jason and I would end up Zooming or Skyping with one another...
Jason: But I think Google Drive is really the space where there's just lots of, like, one person's writing, another person's editing, somebody's commenting, there's just lots of cross-chatter. My typos magically disappear—I always love it when that happens.
Ben: It also happens in person. We have periodic retreats where we get together and get reinvigorated by going on walks and talking about the project, playing, rehearsing media content that we're gonna produce.
Jason: I think the most crucial times have been the times that we get together, I think, for what we've been actually calling retreats, which I should note are not long meetings with food—that's bullshit—but I think the things that we're doing are actually retreats because we really do step back from our everyday teaching and editing lives and make stuff and play.
Ben: It happens largely in between Columbus and Cincinnati. But we've also had the great fortune of going to places like Morgantown, West Virginia. And KairosCamp. And the raccoon bar! I would say one of the real formative experiences for us was going to KairosCamp in 2017. We had two glorious uninterrupted weeks to just work on our stuff. And we were with a group of colleagues who were also in that kind of... in that kind of mindset.
Jason: The support of that KairosCamp community—20 scholars picked to live in a holler and see what happens—and what happened is a book came out of it.
Ben: Having that rare treat of being surrounded by generous scholars and having the time the space to actually do work was just invaluable.
Jason: And I think the spaces we've composed in have definitely affected things. So like this retreat is happening at my condo, the Chase Commons. It's an historic school built in the 1890s, turned into condos in the late nineties by a bunch of radical nuns and otherwise feminist Catholic women. And you know, it's an inspiring space for historians of technology in education. And I think it's really affected this video we're making now.
Ben: Where else has it happened? It's happened in the larger community. Computers and Writing. We've gone and shared our findings along the way with our colleagues there, and we've been really energized by the feedback we've gotten from them.
Jason: Well, you know, I think about the first time we presented this work at Frostburg when we just had 50 years, we had some really shitty graphs made in Excel, and we talked about the project all the way to Frostburg. Where we almost died, by the way. I don't know if you remember that, but there was fog in the mountains, and we couldn't see, and we just kept driving. We made it through this death-defying journey to Frostburg. And we finally get there and our presentation was well attended because what the hell else are you gonna do in Frostburg?
Ben: Because if you know anything about Frostburg, there's not a lot of extracurricular opportunities to do anything so our room was packed.
Jason: It was just a really excited group of people who were interested in the story we had to tell and gave us lots of great feedback about how we might extend it. I don't think we even at that point knew that it was going to be a book but we were like, "We can't! English Journal, we can't quit you!"
[Main theme music]
Ben: I do love the English Journal archive. It is—first of all, it's unapologetically practice driven. And it's the living voices of the people that were in those classrooms, teaching those students.
Jason: I love the English Journal archive for so many reasons. But the thing that I love most about it is that it's kind of a teacher's lounge. It's a space where it's just teachers telling stories of the cool shit they did in their classes, and the cool shit their students made with diverse technologies. And they're just super-excited about it.
Ben: There's a lot of color in those articles. The voices of the people coming through, oftentimes... sometimes in not-so-flattering ways, but a lot of times in very delightful ways.
Jason: This is a group of English teachers that really like to play with language. They'll go really far for an intriguing metaphor or a joke or just sometimes kind of a non sequitur, aside, or literary allusion. And you know honestly, just like in our own writing, some of those going a bit too far with language, some jokes work and some don't. Sometimes they say really problematic things, just as teachers do in the teachers lounge. But you get a sense of them, the people that are in the English Journal archive, as real teachers who have a real passion.
Ben: The entirety of that corpus that we study is just a source of joy, because you can see that there are human beings in there.
[Main theme music]
Jason: And I hope that teachers will first just engage this project and see history as an important resource for rethinking our pedagogy today. We'll realize that, sure, whatever new technology comes down, the students probably know a lot more about it than they do. But as English teachers or as writing teachers, we're part of a long tradition of people who have thought in really creative ways about how to engage students in composing with new technologies. And we can draw on that tradition, and at the same time, we can look at some of the problematic missteps of teachers past. And sometimes we can be critical of things the teachers in the past did around surveillance and control with technology, and then we can see how, actually, we're doing some of the same things but not realizing it because we're in the moment. So I think it can also give us a critical perspective on our contemporary practice by seeing some of the problematic things that happened in the past.
Ben: One of the biggest lessons I want people to take away from a project like this is that history is not a monolith. And we can look in places—often places that haven't been looked at before—and we can find other ways of telling our stories. When it comes to the field itself, there's something to be said for this idea of playing: playing with methodologies, playing with archival materials, just creative play. When it comes to scholarship, for a long time in my professional life, I took the idea of writing articles and writing books as "very serious work," but with this particular project, it's kind of opened up a space to kind of see the joy, which is something that the archive itself taught me. There's a lot of joy in that archive that actually comes through in this work. Or at least I hope it does.
[Main theme music]