Tubing, Theoretically

Carter, Geoffrey V., and Sarah J. Arroyo. “Tubing the Future: Participatory Pedagogy and YouTube U in 2020.” Computers and Composition 28.4 (2011): 292-302. Print.

Carter and Arroyo’s article is from a special edition of Computers and Composition on the future of computer-mediated writing and its pedagogy. In this selection, the authors focus on the participatory nature of online composing and how this may affect instructional methods in the next decade. Their primary exigency is to address what they see as the need for more “theorizing about the participatory practices found in online video culture” (292).

To fill this gap in theorizing, Carter and Arroyo begin by developing their sense of participatory pedagogy. They see participatory pedagogy “as a productive collision of post-critical, postpedagogical, and participatory thought” (293). This collision puts special emphasis on creativity and invention, relying on an emergent rather than a fixed pedagogy. They add to this a discussion of Ulmer’s notion of “electracy,” or electronic literacy. Electracy is open-ended, flexible, and exploratory—precisely the kinds of participatory elements promoted by online spaces like YouTube. To explore how online video culture expands participation and its potential significance for composition pedagogy, the authors next address the development and alterations of memes. Memes are “viral content that is interactive and re-purposed” whose “goal is to create more content to with which other users will connect and invest time in re-purposing, thus participating in spreading ideas and making them more complex” (296). Memes, then, represent the possibility for an individual to take already existing content and alter it in ways that make it meaningful to her while still maintaining some of its original content so that others can recognize it as an extension/recreation of the original. For Carter and Arroyo, though, to be effective pedagogically, participatory pedagogy based on online video culture cannot stop at simply performance; it must also have an element of critique. They claim that memes have the ability to “raise awareness, and elicit massive cultural participation that expands in a malleable network” (297). By adding critique to the performative nature of memes, Carter and Arroyo add the possibility for stronger intellectual work than what some might see in simply creating memes or participating in online video activities “for fun.” In short, participatory pedagogy that relies on online video culture for its framework can serve academic, even civic purposes.

Since this study is a prediction (but not a predictive study) of possible directions for composition pedagogy in the future, I think the authors do well to devote their research to constructing a theoretical framework for “tubing” (i.e., the participatory actions associated with online video culture). They establish quite clearly what this pedagogy will entail (open-endedness, critique combined with performance) and how considering issues like the balance of humor with a serious issue can add to the rhetorical awareness of students. However, some of their claims about how educators might enact this or why this is especially necessary for the pedagogy of the future seemed a little hazy. In some ways, they maybe emphasized the theory at the expense of the practice.