Cerfimacashun!

So I'm studying for my certification exams. That's DOCTORAL certification exams, to you. No, I am NOT studying to be a teacher. Little known fact, Teachers College is especially well-known for its program in Organizational Leadership, and on top of training top-notch teachers it also has programs in counselling, health, cultural studies, cognitive research, and other subjects where doc students are likely to be a little touchy if you assume they're hard up for babysitting work. The papers I am about to get from TC do not authorize me to get anywhere near your children. At least as far as the NCLB crowd cares. Heaven forfend, I might suggest recess for the little darlings.

* * *

"Do you have a list of books you have to read?" Austin innocently asks as we're talking about the exam process in our respective departments. Well, no.

I don't have a required reading list. I did sit down with previous exam questions, though, and in practicing some arguments for them identified the books I thought I'd be relying on. I came up with two short stacks. These are pretty much the books which have been most important to my thinking to date:

In addition to these I have a list of the equally-important stray PDFs and printouts I need to track down for the exam. Extremely loosely, these are:

Deibert, Parchment-Printing-Hypermedia (ordered)
Alphabet piece from communications history
Telegraph piece by Gitlin
Manufacturing Consent chapter from Broughton
AERA UWisc piece on evoking sensation in games (author is Thompson?)
Taylor, Striated and smooth space in games
Konzack, 7 layer model (link is pdf, sorry)
Church, FADT
MDA analysis
DiGRA papers on references to ads in games (brief cite)
Leander or Lankshear, users make no distinction between virtual and real spaces
Adorno (Enlightenment)
Arendt (conformity)
Jameson (the usual)
other theory on scientization of culture
Larry Cuban (more pdf)
Howie's quote about blackboards
How People Learn
Steinkuehler
Squire (dissertation?)
Systems thinking articles
Transfer articles
Metacognition articles
piece on Trinidadians and the Net

Then there's an EndNote database I've been working up of things I've referred to frequently when presenting at conferences. Not reproducing it here, even though it would probably be more useful than that last paragraph of scribbles.

And finally, a short list of canonical authors, mostly from the political economy of media, whom I have taken in by osmosis and wish I'd had more exposure to, most of which I will use as sticks to beat myself with and probably won't read in time:
Gitlin
Chomsky
Bagdikian
McChesney
Goffman, frames, 1974
James Fallows, Breaking the News (ok, did this one cover to cover at Hampy)

* * *

So. Weird little list, huh? You'll notice there's not too much in there on video games, considering everyone thinks that's what I do. Conspicuously absent are anything by Jesper Juul, Espen Aarseth, Gonzalo Frasca, and Salen and Zimmerman's textbooks. Very little new game theory here, though I do think the industry-developed design tools pieces (FADT and MDA) will wow 'em.

Also, I expect I'll make significantly less use of the New Literacies canon than one might expect considering I spend a lot of mental time in that camp. I guess lately I've been moving away from their work... I've had a hard time recreating the linguistics argument which can be used to defend their claim that just about everything is "reading" until I recently went back to Jim Gee's Situated Language and Learning. Actually, that argument may not be my strength... I read the Labov piece defending Black English ("ebonics") in college, but haven't personally done a lot of the reading in sociolinguistics, just taken it in by proxy, so I feel like I mostly have secondhand texts to cite, and I don't always feel comfortable with that when outside of the protection of the lairs of my advisor and his colleagues and their conferences.

To some extent the unevenness of the list is due to the nature of the questions. It seems pretty certain I'll get a question about causality of social change and/or media effects; the books here make a lot of sense from that angle.

Some of these books bear more weight than others. The Deibert book is going to be absolutely indispensable, as are Diffusion of Innovations, Todd Gitlin's piece on the telegraph, and Science in Action I spent maybe equal time on that Latour book and on Henry Jenkins's book a few summers back, and Henry's was more revolutionary in my own thought, but again, it doesn't feel likely I'll be venturing into his arguments unless they throw me something very specifically on demographics and I decide to go off on the nerd rant. Which would be nice, actually, as that's what I WANT to be thinking about right now and don't have time to because of the studying. But the nerd rant is ultimately subcultural and thus peripheral to issues of economic equality and access which are more important to the people reading the paper... plus it's still sort of embryonic... so I should gloss it if anything. It does give me a chance to flaunt my Frankfurt School, though.

Overall, the list is heavy on recent theory, if any... highly phenomenological and specific research... some exceedingly entry-level cognition review... and a few popular texts for good measure.

*stops cold* Good lord... maybe that's all there IS to my "field."

Believe me, though... put all this together and it all makes sense to me. Want me to defend it? I can do it... I've been training... c'mon, lemme show you! Try to poke holes in my argument! *hardens abs and prepares to block*

* * *

Why don't we have a reading list? Because there is no reading list. Not in the sense of my game design professor who'd defend his sneak-attack syllabus ("OK read 180-page design doc and play Deus Ex for class tomorrow ready go! oh, it's midterms week?... um... booyah!") by saying there was no syllabus for game design yet. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, there is no Reading List. And more concretely, any reading list generated by my department could choke a sperm whale.(1) Here's a brief sampling of what the faculty in our program report about their intellectual interests and histories:

• "Using cognitive and neural net models to design learning environments. "
• "Race/ethnicity and gender in education; Literacies; Deconstructing the 'School-to-prison' pipeline"
• "Intellectual development. Mathematics education. Testing and assessment."
• "Doctoral Dissertation: 'Augustus and Vergil: Pietas and the Pedagogy of Power'"
• "Vocabulary development and reading comprehension... Models of reading and composing"
• "Metacognition and problem solving, technology-mediated cultural interactions and their impact on teacher professional development and reflection"
• "Discourse Analysis. Children's Second Language and Literacy Development."
• "Thesis: 'If We Are Any good' - A study of the theology implicit in selected modern prose fiction'"
• "Polity and community theory, particularely as it applies to families, their immediate situations, and their positions in a global humanity as the joint production of all involved."

Mind you, this is the faculty in OUR PROGRAM -- as in the Communications, Computing, and Tech program OF the Math, Science, and Tech DEPARTMENT. There are separate programs for languages, international studies, religion, English literature, cognition, and mathematics. (The college was ruthlessly gerrymandered by some previous president looking to make his mark on the place. I was so unsettled by the idea of studying in a department with Mathematics in the title that I nearly didn't enroll. There really isn't another group of people I can imagine who would be less well-suited to close quarters with mathematicians. We're really only related to them in terms of funding allotments.)

And of course our department is in the Teachers College OF Columbia University, through whose halls we are permitted to run about as essentially intellectually undiapered as I was at Hampshire College, bare bottoms winking in the sunshine.(2)

God bless our faculty. As a group, they're exemplars of self-directed education. They encourage us to be the same -- their "required course list" is really just a few suggestions for those who don't get it yet; and seriously, just check out what Robbie has to say about being a doc student. They've got the theory AND empirical data to explain why having us do this is the best preparation for the work we'll need to do as scholars and practitioners. The terrifying burden of bringing all their ideas together is pretty much on us as students; still, I wouldn't trade 'em for anything.

* * *

I've totally found the perfect room to work in, too. It reminds me so much of a hotel suite that when a truck came rushing by just now on Amsterdam it took me a moment to remember where I was, that there wasn't a distant freeway out there with undeveloped fields and parking lots for buffer. Someday it'll really sink in that I work better the more sterile a space I'm in, and I'll stop cluttering my desks with pictures and toys and piles of crap.

(1) Those are the ones with the teeth, not the baleen ones.
(2) Thank you, Roald Dahl!

Posted by Gus at June 02, 2006 02:45 AM