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? Knowledge Work with the Cherokee Nation
The Pedagogy of Engaging Publics in a Praxis of New Media
Ellen Cushman and Erik Green
The Allottment Era in Cherokee History. Opening graphic for Cherokee Nation Web site at http://www. cherokee. org/allotment
In spring 2005 at Michigan State University (MSU), students enrolled in the Multimedia Writing class, including undergraduate Erik Green, along with instructor Ellen Cushman, produced an educational Web site in conjunction with representatives from the Cherokee Nation (CN): Gloria Sly, the cultural resources director; Richard Allen, the policy analyst for the Cherokee Nation;
? 176 Ellen Cushman and Erik Green
and Tonia Williams, the webmaster for the Nation. Our main task was to create a Web site that examined the kinds of rhetorical, literate, and legal struggles experienced by the Cherokees living in Indian Territory during the allotment period (roughly between 1887 and 1914). Gloria, Tonia, and Richard perceived a need for an in-depth and accessible understanding of the period, something that could be disseminated widely and could represent the com- plexity of competing perspectives at the time. They set this goal for the proj- ect in part because Oklahoma was poised to celebrate the anniversary of its statehood and was disseminating histories that de-emphasized the history of Indian Territory. The process of allotment, the individualization and privatiza- tion of land among Native peoples who had been removed to Indian Territory, was central to this history of the current state. They also set this goal because they considered the allotment period a time in the Cherokee Nation's history that was equally important to the Trail of Tears, though not often treated in published histories. The Multimedia Writing class I was teaching could pro- duce this history to be distributed as part of the educational resources cur- rently on the Cherokee Nation's site.
And so with their blessings, our class set about reading hundreds of pages of legislation, treaties, Senate reports, pioneer papers, and tribal histories as well as collecting and analyzing drawings, advertisements, documentaries, and photographs. Throughout spring 2005 we met with Tonia and Gloria as well as Ben Philips. Through videoconference and e-mail, we discussed our progress on interface design and content delivery, and secured their continued bless- ings on this work.
When engaging publics as rhetoricians, these students experienced keen pressure to produce historically accurate, publicly available multimedia edu- cational materials for an audience of Cherokee Nation Web site visitors (some 6,000 hits per day). The screenshot that opens this essay is of the entry portal to the educational resource that we created. The screenshot represents a culmi- nation of learning for students who developed their understandings of author- ship, ownership, and representation while working at the intersection of cultural, critical, and digital literacies. In this essay, we situate the story of the Cherokee Nation/MSU Collaborative within a praxis of new media. The kinds of composing students engaged in differed considerably from those they had done throughout their college writing experience, causing dissonance, exacer- bation, concern, and ultimately a class meltdown in willingness to continue with the work. Through open discussion, the leadership of three team pro- grammers (Erik was one), and the assurance that this kind of writing product and process is precisely what teams of knowledge workers experience on their job sites, students ultimately completed a project that the Cherokee Nation now hosts at www. cherokee. org/allotment. The entire process was stressful, intense, joyful, challenging, and demanding--everything, we think, learning should be.
Knowledge Work with the Cherokee Nation 177
While the culmination of learning represented in this screenshot is note- worthy, so, too, were the important lessons we gathered about the differences between authoring and representing a tribe's history and culture from this praxis of new media. Even though we initially strived to produce culturally relevant materials, we found that the Nation bounded the scope of the proj- ect as it became clearer to them what information about the tribe they wanted to be publicly available. This boundary between representations of the tribe's history and representations of its culture became apparent to us as we drafted content that was eventually deleted by the Nation's representatives. Ultimately, this screenshot represents one chapter in the Cherokee Nation's history, but it does not represent the tribe's cultural perseverance in the face of allotment. While this partnership and the specific learning outcomes it achieved may be unique and contingent, the intellectual framework that helped structure this learning might well be transportable to other contexts where students do knowledge work as rhetoricians.
The Cherokee Nation/MSU Collaborative
In collaboration with representatives of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma (CN), MSU students enrolled in Multimedia Writing, along with the instruc- tor, developed a Web site and CD titled The Allotment in Cherokee History 1887- 1914. 1 This collaboration began with a qualitative study of Cherokee language and identity that Ellen continues today. To begin this study, she attended the Cherokee National Holiday in 2004 and learned about the kinds of digital mediations the tribe was undertaking in order to reach its citizens who live away from the tribal cores in Oklahoma and North Carolina where the lan- guage is spoken and Cherokee traditions and religion are still practiced. Ellen learned that many people in the Nation were warm and inviting to citizens raised away from Oklahoma, especially since the CN has diverse needs for citi- zens with skills and education to contribute to the betterment of the tribe.
Fast forward to fall 2004: Ellen enrolled in Cherokee 1 taught by Ed Fields, whom she had also met at the National Holiday. At that time, Sammy Still was the course administrator and long-time insider to both the Eastern Band of the Cherokees and the CN. He and Ellen wrote e-mails often outside of class, exchanging stories and ideas for cultural preservation. Ellen asked if he thought maybe she and her students at MSU could do a multimedia project with and for the Cherokee Nation. He sent her to speak with Tonia Williams and Gloria Sly. To Tonia and Gloria, Ellen described some possible projects, and they saw a place where we could begin.
Together, the three of us agreed that educational materials about the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 were needed to show how this federal policy of parceling out Native Americans' commonly held land into individual units of private property has shaped current perspectives on Cherokee citizenship, identity, sovereignty, and the geographic dispersion of the tribe. 2 One of our
178 Ellen Cushman and Erik Green
aims was to recover stories of the allotment process from as many perspec- tives as possible, to extend the histories that were already told about and from the Nation, and to link these past events to the present. The Nation had three goals for this work:
satisfy the need for educational materials that present in-depth, accessible understanding of the allotment period in Cherokee history for any learner interested;
distribute widely these digital products to citizens of the tribe, educators, noncitizens of the tribe, and anyone who visits Tahlequah, Oklahoma, during the Cherokee National Holiday; and
relocate the typical histories of Oklahoma from the vantage point of Indian Territory.
The allotment period was a time in the tribe's history that was equally im- portant to the Trail of Tears, though not treated as often in published his- tories. The allotment era is important because it has shaped the Cherokees' current views on citizenship, identity, sovereignty, and the geographic disper- sion of the tribe. As is the case with most federal legislation in relation to Native peoples, this, too, was touted as an effort to "civilize" Native Ameri- cans; the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 and the Curtis Act of 1898 leg- islated that all Native American tribes were to split their commonly held land on reservations into individually owned private property. Land that was not allotted was then opened for "settlement. " This act was part of the larger story of "the Progressive Era" in U. S. history that included ideologies of manifest destiny, the great westward expansion, and taming the Wild West. U. S. his- tories of this time are usually told from the urban, eastern-seaboard vantage point--a perspective that looks from the U. S. East Coast outward toward the West, a vantage that sees "wildness," vast stretches of "unused land," and pas- sive, even welcoming, Indians. 3
Our work for this project tries to re-place the stories of allotment from the vantage of Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, where the Cherokee Nation is based in Tahlequah. This vantage relocates the story of the Progressive Era, showing the detrimental effects of allotment policy for the Cherokees in Indian Territory, who suffered an erosion of sovereignty, land holdings, and economic bases for their tribe, as well as forced assimilation through reedu- cation and dissolution of their tribal governments. This counternarrative is one that the CN wanted to present to their Web users, teachers, and students as a corrective to the myths of the Progressive Era narrative. We have presented this counternarrative with digital stories, cut-and-paste text, audio recordings, and images, as well as links to primary sources, such as legislation and public documents.
Since this site was launched at the 2005 Cherokee National Holiday, the chief's policy analyst, Richard Allen, joined Gloria, Tonia, and Ellen. The
Knowledge Work with the Cherokee Nation 179
project has grown to include an installment for the Nation's online history that explores the treaties and laws that shaped the tribe from the early 1700s up to the allotment. 4 Together with the MSU Writing in Digital Environments Research Center, this collaborative has exchanged files and collaborated on beta versions of projects through a jointly shared server space that Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) maintains for our use. Throughout each semes- ter, our collaborative met twice through video conferencing provided by MSU's Writing Center using Avacaster software that the Nation provides to host its language classes. Ellen would then head to Tahlequah over the summer to work through final programming and editing, making necessary revisions to design and content. Though students were not privy to these meetings, their work was impacted by the decisions made at them.
The particular multimedia writing course we describe in this essay is not at all unique in that it has the typical layers of institutional, curricular, and social complexities that have been well documented in research on service learning in rhetoric and composition. 5 In particular, Nora Bacon has focused on the mismatch between the intellectual and rhetorical skills that students bring to class and those required to write in public contexts. She describes how difficult it is for students to learn the genres, content, and styles needed to write well in, for, and with community organizations, let alone being able to understand adequately the context and exigencies within which commu- nity organizations do their work. The central problem she identifies has to do with the extent to which students can really become immersed enough in the context of their work to develop a sense of authorship and valid representa- tions. Immersion in the content and context of work should not be mistaken for immersion in a culture.
With Bacon, we have found that students can feel daunted and stressed when trying to meet the authorship, ownership, and representational demands of knowledge work in university and community projects. Their immersion in this particular project involved learning three software packages and file management strategies, in addition to historically appropriate content, styles, and genres needed to produce this educational piece--all this within the infrastructural constraints of this classroom environment. DeVoss, Cushman, and Grabill describe the infrastructure of new media and the ways in which it enables and constrains new media composing. "These often invisible struc- tures make possible and limit, shape and constrain, influence and penetrate all acts of composing new media in writing classes. Though these structural as- pects of teaching new media might easily be dismissed as mere inconvenience when they break down or rupture entirely, they are, in fact, deeply imbedded in the acts of digital media composing. [They] argue that infrastructures are absolutely necessary for writing teachers and their students to understand if we hope to enact the possibilities offered by new media composing. "6 In a praxis of new media, students learn the ways in which infrastructures influence
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their composing. An awareness of infrastructural constraints can be cultivated with students as they press the limits of computing resources in their produc- tion processes. A praxis of new media helps students identify the ways in which policies, institutional conventions, and procedures for composing with new media enable and limit their knowledge work.
In a praxis of new media, students also become critically aware of the lim- its of their immersion in the knowledge bases of the organizations, commu- nities, and tribes with whom they work. In the case of this collaborative, students were able to immerse themselves in the history of the Nation, but were not immersed in the cultural traditions of the tribe. This nuance has everything to do with the ways in which indigenous nations articulate their sovereignty through a political and governmental interface with the wider public and with state and federal governments; behind this interface is cul- tural tradition that is practiced and maintained at the local level, often pro- tected from outsiders and not often or necessarily mediated (for example, filmed, written about, or photographed).
As one way to understand this difference between Nations and tribes, anthropologist James Clifford, following Stuart Hall, offers the idea that cul- tural tradition is an articulation: "In articulation theory . . . the process of social and cultural persistence is political all the way back. It is assumed that cultural forms will always be made, unmade, and remade. Communities can and must reconfigure themselves, drawing selectively on remembered pasts. The relevant question is whether, and how, they convince and coerce insid- ers and outsiders, often in power charged, unequal situations, to accept the autonomy of a 'we. '"7
Cultural articulation, then, would be viewed as a place where Native cul- tures choose which part of their past and current traditions and practices and events to represent in order to enact part of their sovereignty--a process that allows them to name who they are, what makes them autonomous, what practices count, what structures govern, and what technologies allow for adaptation and preservation. Thus Clifford might see the Cherokee Nation's attempts to use the Internet for cultural preservation as the very articulation of reconfiguration; new technologies and popular cultural artifacts, such as the educational piece we developed with the Cherokee Nation, are created in an ongoing process of nation formation; importantly, this formation is dis- tinct from tribal formation or the preservation of tribal practices. The Nation is the political, public face of the sovereign entity, while the tribe is the cul- tural practices, social networks, and lineal relations that have existed since time immemorial. As a praxis of new media unfolded, it became clear to stu- dents that they were immersing themselves in the history of the Cherokee Nation and were not responsible, to their relief and disappointment, for im- mersing themselves in the culture of the tribe.
Knowledge Work with the Cherokee Nation 181
As a theoretical framework for public rhetorics, then, a praxis of new media helps to account for the knowledge bases that students will immerse them- selves in as they write in university and community partnerships. Working at the intersections of community, critical, and digital literacies in a service- learning / new media course places demands on the intellectual and rhetori- cal understandings that students bring to writing classes. Because it frames the reflective practices, rhetorical conventions, and infrastructures that enable learning, a praxis of new media offers students a language for understanding their authorship, representations, and ownership. They begin to see praxis as the phronesis it is: ethical action that adheres to conventions of behavior that are set forth by stakeholders. These conventions of behavior, in our case, came to light as a boundary limit to our representation of the Cherokee Nation. Said another way, as our collaborators articulated to us the difference between the Cherokee Nation and tribe, we learned the phronesis--that is, the ethical action "adhering to certain ideal standards of good (ethical) or effective (political) behavior" necessary to undertake this knowledge work. 8 To illus- trate, we offer a brief discussion of what we are calling a praxis of new media as it relates to students' learning in the class.
A Praxis of New Media
As a theoretical model for reflective practice, a praxis of new media works at the intersections of critical, community, and digital literacies with the goal of knowledge production. Our notion of praxis has its intellectual roots in Aris- totelian rhetoric as phronesis, ethical action, and good judgment for the pub- lic good, but also in critical pedagogy as it is infused with notions of praxis that is both action and reflection. 9 Stakeholders in this model can include teachers, students, community and workplace members, and scholars. A praxis of new media works from three premises:
all stakeholders have knowledge, critical awareness, and important per- spectives on the social problems being addressed;
high-end technologies and multimedia texts need to be interrogated-- and produced--with stakeholders; and
a flexibly structured inquiry and problem-solving approach to research and curriculum, one that applies knowledge from various disciplines, can help students address problems that community members have identified.
A praxis of new media can be understood as an expansion of the designs of meaning and kinds of pedagogical practices described in the New London Group's "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies" and their later book on this topic, Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. 10 In these works the authors bring together an interdisciplinary understanding of language and
182 Ellen Cushman and Erik Green
literacy to describe what they call designs, or those flexibly structured social organizations, knowledge bases, and cultural practices that influence daily meaning-making practices and life chances.
In "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies," the authors describe the pedagogies related to multiliteracies.
Situated Practice
Overt Instruction
Critical Framing
Transformed Practice
Immersion in experience and the utilization of avail- able discourses and simulations of the relationships to be found in workplaces and public spaces.
Systematic, analytic, and conscious understanding.
. . . This requires the introduction of explicit metalan- guages. . . .
Interpreting the social and cultural context of particu- lar designs of meaning. This involves students standing back from what they are studying and viewing it criti- cally in relation to its context.
Transfer in meaning making practice, which puts the transformed meaning to work in other contexts or cul- tural sites. 11
A praxis of new media is a theoretical and pedagogical framing of the ways in which community, critical, and digital literacies are combined in commu- nity literacy initiatives. It expands upon the practices listed above by includ- ing both a notion of audience and infrastructure, as these rhetorical and material conditions are absent from a theory of multiliteracies.
Though the space of possibility that a praxis of new media occupies is dif- ficult to obtain and sustain, it can result in engaging public rhetorics on many levels and is therefore worthy of our attention.
Pedagogies Related to a Praxis of New Media
Situated practice
Overt Instruction
Critical Framing
Immersion in experience and the utilization of available discourses and technologies for meaning making; pur- poses, audiences, collaborations are real time, not sim- ulated.
Systematic, analytic, and conscious understanding.
. . .
This requires the introduction of explicit metalan- guages . . . It also requires introduction and ample opportunity for authentic multimedia and computer tool use.
Interpreting the social and cultural context of particular designs of meaning. This involves students becoming deeply, ethically, involved in what they are studying, having a stake in making new knowledge, and viewing it critical in relation to its context.
Transformed Practice
Ethical Practice
Transfer in meaning-making practice based on the real needs and purposes of communities, which puts the transformed meaning to work for real audiences in other contexts or cultural sites.
Praxis of new media and digital technology is learned as it is used in critical interpretation and production activities that increase students' civic participation and academic preparedness; and teaching and research are conducted with community members and students in collaborative inquiry for problem solving. Respecting boundaries set by stakeholders and adjusting work to suit the limits of representation they set are key.
Knowledge Work with the Cherokee Nation 183
A pedagogy of multiliteracies issues a call for transformative practice that scholars around the country are beginning to realize in their curricula. That is, the call for a pedagogy of multiliteracies needs to model ways in which it can be enacted both inside and outside the classroom. How might this model be adopted in and adapted to local purposes, knowledge, and activities? In what ways might rhetoricians and writing teachers and students work at the intersection of digital, critical, and community literacies to develop civically responsible research? We explore these questions below by revising the peda- gogies of multiliteracies in light of digital composing for public audiences and their rhetorical exigencies. In the remainder of this essay, we describe this framework, then apply it to the teaching, research, and service related to the Multimedia Writing class in order to demonstrate how a praxis of new media unfolds in the learning practices of students. We find that the learning prac- tices that take place in this particular partnership may well be unique to this project; however, the intellectual framework that guides the critical reflection on learning might well illuminate the work unfolding in other work in pub- lic rhetorics.
Situated Practice in a Praxis of New Media
Rather than simulating the relationships to be found in the workplace and the experiences of using available discourses as a pedagogy of multiliteracies might, the Multimedia Writing class actually immersed students in a process and knowledge base that created a workplace using an entirely new form of discourse related to Cherokee history. Students initially read, wrote reflections, and discussed hundreds of pages of primary and secondary readings about the allotment period in order to reach their first milestone: a compilation of "re- search papers" that were to become the content of the online materials.
At the start of the class, the members on this group project had very little knowledge about the allotment period or the Cherokee Nation, and so it was necessary for us to engage in what was described as an immersion process.
184 Ellen Cushman and Erik Green
Using as many primary documents as possible, we spent the first few weeks of the semester in an intensive reading process where we tried to familiarize ourselves as completely yet efficiently as possible with the history, treaties, reactions, reasoning, and effects of the allotment period.
For Erik, although he had a vague knowledge of historical events like the Trail of Tears or of Native customs regarding land, he had no idea about all the intricacies and nuances of the time period or of the Cherokee way of life. However, he was able to quickly learn and absorb a lot of different ideas in those first few weeks--from understanding the ideas of communal land ownership, to exploring how advanced the cultures of the Five Civilized Tribes really were (in direct contrast to how they were characterized by white settlers), to seeing how important laws and treaties were in the allotment process (such as the infamous Dawes Act), to reading direct stories of people living in Indian Territory.
This immersion was a necessary step before we even began contemplating our project, since so many parts of it--not just the content, but also the de- sign and the way we framed the issue--were dependant on our understanding of the time period and the culture. It also set up a specific pedagogical move of giving our class--a group of white, privileged students with no experience working with the Cherokee Nation--a chance to move from being interested but uninformed students to being content managers who were experts in this historical period (relatively speaking). Aside from building our knowledge, this immersion process also built our confidence.
One of the difficulties with this immersion process, however, was that although we were situating ourselves directly in the written discourses of the time period, there was still the tendency for it to feel disconnected or unau- thentic. At this point in the course, our immediate goal was still an academic essay--something that, although required for the institution and useful for our work as university students, was hard to conceptualize as part of our final product. By attempting to break down the readings and responding with a very specific focus, we were able to successfully create a simulated situated practice--especially with the large number of primary documents--which helped to place us within the context of the allotment period. However, the authenticity of the work would not be apparent until later in the course, when we discovered that we could practically cut the content from one genre--our academic papers--and paste it into another--our Web site/CD-Rom, some- thing that felt much more authentic in its creation.
In this situated practice, then, the genre of academic research paper, at first, seemed extraneous, perhaps even arbitrary to students. Their sense of author- ship had not yet fully developed because it seemed to them that this paper was merely an exercise meant to prove to the professor they had done their readings or had explored something of interest to them, as is the case with many of the research papers. The practice of immersing in the historical
Knowledge Work with the Cherokee Nation 185
knowledge base still seemed simulated, a simulation that felt disconnected to the final project and the people it was meant to represent. This immersion also seemed to give some students the impression that they were learning about the culture of the tribe as opposed to the history of the Nation. Certainly our readings covered ways in which Cherokee culture changed as a result of allot- ment, but reading a text about the history of a culture does not translate into a license to represent cultural knowledge. This key difference in representa- tional authority would become more apparent to us as the semester progressed.
Overt Instruction in a Praxis of New Media
In a praxis of new media overt instruction includes a systematic, analytic, and conscious understanding and introduction of metalanguages related to soft- ware and means of production. It also requires introduction and ample oppor- tunity for authentic multimedia and computer tool use and is in line with an infrastructural approach to composing in new media. In community and institutional settings that rely on new media, infrastructural constraints both enable and limit the knowledge work possible. Unfortunately, these infra- structures remain largely invisible until they break or their limits have been reached. The when of new media composing came to the foreground as issues with accessibility and transportability of our work emerged. Here the immer- sion in the infrastructural limits and knowledge needed to circumvent these moved from being simulated to an actual exigency--our collaborators' needs became apparent at the receiving end. At the same time as we were determin- ing the naming conventions and boundaries of our file production, we were also determining the boundaries of our representational authority. While file- naming conventions might feel simply technical in nature, they were rhe- torical and had everything to do with our audience's goals for content and establishing the nature of our authoritative and representational limits.
Overt instruction in how to manage projects moved to the foreground as students began to see that they did not own this work, but were producing pages that would eventually be uploaded, changed, and resaved at the CN. File management lessons were crucial to this process as teams took these les- sons and developed naming protocols for the site's architecture. Their nam- ing protocols made explicit the ways that knowledge work must be handled within class and were created with an upstream audience in mind--the web- master and her team at the Cherokee Nation had to be able to make sense of the file structure and naming conventions. While instruction in file manage- ment came at the beginning of the semester, it was encountering infrastruc- tural constraints of having to transfer and reclaim so many files that made this a practice that took into consideration the transportability and life of the files outside of class.
File management is rhetorical at another level: we were developing and naming content areas, tracing out for our collaborators the scope and nature
186 Ellen Cushman and Erik Green
of what we were to represent. Some students became uncomfortable with their lack of tribal knowledge as they were bringing together the content of the papers into what would become the files developed for content nodes. They were concerned that, as outsiders, they were not getting it right and worse that they had no right to be talking about how family structures changed, for instance, because they did not know what family structures were like before allotment and now.
By happy coincidence, we had a visit by Craig Howe, a speaker brought to campus and a new media developer who worked with the Lakota to create multimedia educational resources about their winter counts. When some stu- dents voiced their concerns about the limits of their knowledge of the tribe, he assured us all that we were representing the history of the Nation and not the tribe. He explained that he was not allowed to show many of his multi- media works outside of the Lakota tribe because they represented tribal knowl- edge. However, when a nation commissions a work, and much of that work is drawn from historical documents, it is not likely to be representing tribal knowledge so much as a nation's history. While Ellen had assumed students would inductively understand this distinction from the nature of the histor- ical documents we were using, Craig's explicit instruction put to rest students' initial concerns by pointing to the ways that indigenous peoples articulate a difference between nations and tribes.
In both their authoring of the content and saving it under conventional- ized file structures, students were developing their sense of authoring and ownership to include audiences and exigencies beyond this class. Importantly, this critical reflection would not have been prompted had the infrastructural constraints presented themselves and the rhetorical boundaries of their work became evident to them. In a praxis of new media, then, the technical is often rhetorical and the instrumental subject to exigencies of audiences.
Critical Framing in a Praxis of New Media
In a pedagogy of multiliteracies, critical framing results from interpreting the social and cultural context of particular designs of meaning. This interpreta- tion and critique means applying a critical theory to whatever problem, issue, or object is under study. Rather than asking students to enact disinterested critique of the content they were developing, as a pedagogy of multiliteracies might ask, a praxis of new media demands that students have deep immer- sion in and commitment to the products they are producing. Their analysis is done from the perspective of becoming ethically involved in what they are studying, having a stake in making new knowledge, and viewing it critically in relation to its context. For students, their positions as stakeholders in the project emerged in various instances of strong responses that they had when they increasingly took hold of the authoring responsibility, ownership of the structure of their learning, and initial representations of this learning.
Knowledge Work with the Cherokee Nation 187
One of the unexpected results of our work was the very emotional response that we had with the material. We remember one student in particular who broke into tears when we were sharing our research papers with each other. For the most part, no one in the class had any extensive background in Chero- kee history, but through our immersion process at the beginning of the class we were all situated as "experts" by the time our research papers were finished and we were preparing to create our multimedia project. Although no one in the class, outside of the instructor, was Cherokee, as a result of our immersion in the history, and as we prepared to try to tell that story through our proj- ect for others, there was a distinct emotional connection that was made--one that rarely happens with other traditional research assignments. This emo- tional connection to the work increased the sense of authorship we had as we moved from knowing little to being immersed in the topic enough to see our- selves as novice-experts.
Finally, after immersing ourselves in two very different discourses of learn- ing content, then the software to present this content, and becoming profi- cient in them (although it was to varying degrees how much the students personally felt like they had become "experts"), we were able to tackle the actual issue of creating our project. At first we had to consider the overall rep- resentation of the materials we thought would work best for the Nation and users who came to the site. We visually arranged the topics of our papers using Post-it notes on a whiteboard and as a class discussed the generalized topics and overarching areas we envisioned for the major categories of our project-- what we dubbed "nodes," which eventually became the hotlinks around the septagon as seen in the image that opens this essay. We presented a wire frame of the interface to the Cherokee Nation that included a node for reli- gious practices, among others, and they agreed that the design, potential con- tent, and navigational structure of the wire frame was strong.
We were simultaneously balancing ideas of organization, rhetoric, and design as we considered the ways that our categories could successfully cover all the topics we wanted to talk about, the ways that our written research papers could be the starting point for each of those topics, and the ways that our design would fit the rhetoric we designed for the project as a whole. As all of the pieces of the class came together then, the sense of being a stakeholder in the project emerged from immersion that went beyond disinterested cri- tique to a commitment to the purpose, content, and scope of the knowledge work. This critical framing of course included interpretation and analysis in the content of our papers, especially as we each tackled one aspect of Chero- kee history and culture and tried to reveal how the allotment process changed it, but it also included an ethical commitment to the ownership and author- ship of the work. One student in particular became deeply interested in the Cherokee stomp dance as a tradition that has been maintained despite allot- ment and the increased importance of the Cherokee Baptist church to the
188 Ellen Cushman and Erik Green
tribe. He created a digital video describing the stomp dance, piecing together additional research on the Internet and books to describe the dance. Because the CN representatives had already endorsed the inclusion of religious prac- tices and the placeholder content that indicated we were going to talk about Cherokee Baptists as well as stomp dance, we thought it would be strong con- tent to add. However, as the next section shows, the critical framing and immersion in the project brought about thornier issues in representation.
Transformed and Ethical Praxis of New Media
Transfer in meaning-making practice is based on the experienced needs and purposes of communities. To this, a praxis of new media adds the component of public writing for purposes and within exigencies designated by stakehold- ers. New media and digital technology are learned as they are used in critical interpretation and production activities that increase students' civic partici- pation; and teaching and research are conducted with community members and students in collaborative inquiry for problem solving. The praxis of new media hit home for students how their authorship, ownership, and represen- tational practices were being changed as they engaged in this knowledge work.
The final challenge to our understandings of representation could not be foreseen in the content we developed. One of the surprising results of work- ing with a partner outside of our group and gifting them with a rhetorical cre- ation was some of the final content management that the Cherokee Nation did. In particular, we had a section outlining some of the religious practices of the Cherokees, especially in regards to the way these were used as a form of resistance. However, the Cherokee Nation decided that they did not want this sort of information published since it dealt a little too closely with prac- tices that they considered sacred and private, so whole pages of that subnode were removed--including the video file describing the stomp dance that one student had spent weeks developing. It was his main contribution to the en- tire node. Especially given the time and effort that the individual who created that subnode and video spent in making his section, it was tough to imagine having parts of it removed, but we realized that it was necessary to under- stand and respect the reasons for doing so.
In this way, even though we had taken pride in the work and our author- ing of the best site possible, we understood that our representations may not be as culturally relevant as they should have been, or in this case, that they were too culturally relevant and the CN did not want this tribal knowledge to be widely disseminated. 12 This became evident to Ellen as she worked with the CN collaborators in Tahlequah. They debated for some time the possible inclusion of this stomp dance video and the text surrounding it in this node. Recognizing the hard work the student had done, they still were not comfort- able with the level of nuance in the video--stomp dance differs from ground to ground, and it seemed that this representation was both revealing too much
Knowledge Work with the Cherokee Nation 189
and not enough. In the end, when the project was handed over to the Nation, our ownership of it ended though our responsibilities for representing their history did not. The historical representations were strong and accurately re- flected the immersion that students had in the history of the Nation, but the ways that the Nation articulated itself to us as a public face for the tribe had to be learned the hard way--by developing content that ultimately could not be included despite initial green lights for inclusion.
We learned firsthand and the hard way the difference that Howe explained: we were immersed in and representing the history of the Nation and the his- tory that the Nation wanted us to represent; we were not immersed in or representing the culture or the tribe's cultural practices. This rhetorical and ethical boundary emerged as the work progressed and the Cherokee Nation's representatives articulated the difference between the Nation's history and the tribe's cultural practices, a difference we were ethically bound to respect. While we had immersed ourselves in the historical representations of the Nation, we mistook this immersion as knowledge of cultural practices.
Implications
As these examples illustrate, students' previously held notions of authorship, ownership, and representation shifted as this course progressed and even after the final project had been delivered. All of these aspects of learning in a praxis of new media reveal the ways in which it is important to press boundaries of conventional writing classroom practice, but also point to the limits of knowl- edge work with community partners.
With so many shifts in learning contexts--from the content of the course, to the tools used to represent it, to the exigencies and purposes for learning, to the audiences who read this writing--the effect can cause strong emotional response and dissonance. If students and professors understand the ways in which a praxis of new media revises knowledge work, then perhaps some of the dissonance might be mitigated. In subsequent iterations of this course, the ways in which the work would unfold were expressed upfront, placed into the syllabus for the course, and repeated frequently so that students could at least anticipate the challenges this class content and tools present to their pre- vious forms of learning, writing, and reading. Ellen has been especially care- ful to make explicit for students how they will be immersing themselves in the history of the CN that is for the most part publicly available, as opposed to immersing themselves in the culture of the Cherokee tribe.
The lessons we learned are important for work that engages students in participating in public rhetorics. First, the technical is often rhetorical. Know- ing infrastructural limits and working within and against these is a rhetorical process that must take into account the needs, purposes, capacities, exigen- cies, and work activities of audiences beyond our classrooms. 13 Second, stake- holders in public writing collaborations set the representational boundaries
190 Ellen Cushman and Erik Green
that often articulate the autonomy of themselves as a "we" that protects cul- tural knowledge while producing historically accurate materials. Students learn to compose the public face of an organization or tribe from historical texts and/or highly selected texts that the stakeholders want to be used. Their im- mersion in and with texts does not equate to immersion with a culture; writ- ing a valid history is powerful work that is quite different from writing a valid ethnographic representation.
The knowledge work taking place at the intersection of critical, digital, and community literacies is certainly complex and complicated, at times daunt- ingly so. A praxis of new media is an intellectual framework for scaffolding active work; rather than disappearing into the work once a project begins, the framework always allows one to see, critique, and adjust practice throughout the development and iterations of that work. This framework provides a metalanguage for learning how to learn, and may offer a buoy to help profes- sors and students understand the changing nature of the learning unfolding in the class. The intellectual framework of a praxis of new media will be use- ful to describe the knowledge work unfolding in public rhetorics.
Notes
1. Cherokee Nation, Allotment.
2. Ellen's family went through this process of allotment and enrolled on the Dawes roll, a kind of census for the Cherokee Nation and other tribes. Because they went through that seven-year-long process, today's generations of Drews (my Cherokee fam- ily's name) are able to maintain our citizenship with the tribe.
3. While helping the Cherokee Nation produce a counternarrative is an important topic that Ellen has explored elsewhere, this essay focuses more on the transformative learning for students understood within a praxis of new media. Cushman and Ghosh, "Mediation. "
4. To view the second installment, visit http://www. cherokee. org/cultures/treaties/ toc. htm.
5. See Deans, Writing Partnerships; Crooks and Watters, Writing in the Community; Flower, Long, and Higgins, Learning to Rival; Herzberg, "Community Service"; Flower "Partners in Inquiry"; Flower, Problem Solving; Peck, Flower, and Higgins, "Community Literacy"; Bacon, "Building a Swan's Nest"; Grabill, Community Literacy; Coogan, "Coun- terpublics"; Cushman, "Public Intellectual"; Cushman, Special Issue; Cushman, "Sus- tainable Service"; Cushman and Emmons, "Contact Zones"; Schutz and Gere, "Service Learning"; Carrick, Himley, and Jacobi, "Ruptura. "
6. Devoss, Cushman, and Grabill, "Infrastructure," 16. 7. Clifford, "Indigenous Articulations," 479.
8. Warry, quoted in Cushman, Struggle, 28.
9. Freire, Pedagogy.
10. Cushman, "Toward a Praxis"; Cazden et al. , "Pedagogy of Multiliteracies"; Cope and Kalantzis, Multiliteracies.
11. Cazden et al. , "Pedagogy of Multiliteracies," 88.
12. Cushman and Ghosh, "Mediation. "
13. See Grabill, Writing Community Change; Simmons and Grabill, "Toward a Civic
Rhetoric. "
Knowledge Work with the Cherokee Nation 191
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