Tactics and Strategies of Relationship- Based Practice: Reassessing the Institutionalization of Community Literacy

This essay revises Paula Mathieu’s call for relationship-based tactics of engagement over institution-based strategies. Because engaged scholars operate within institutional contexts, they should utilize both tactics and strategies to make the academic institutional paradigm more conducive to relationship-based engagement. In supporting this long-term goal, community-literacy practitioners can adapt Brian Huot’s theory of instructive evaluation to enable collaborative assessment of community partnerships. One possible mechanism for such institutional invention would be the establishment of quasi-strategic, quasi-tactical Community- Literacy Associations

Telling Students it’s O.K. to Fail, but Showing Them it Isn’t: Dissonant Paradigms of Failure in Higher Education

Educators increasingly extol failure as a necessary component of learning and growth. However, students frequently experience failure as a source of fear and anxiety that impedes risk-taking and experimentation. This essay examines the dissonance between these generative and stigmatized paradigms of failure, and it offers ideas for better negotiating this dissonance. After conceptualizing the two paradigms, I examine various factors that reinforce failure’s stigmatization. I emphasize precarious meritocracy, a neoliberal ethos driven by hypercompetitive individualism that makes success a zero-sum game, and that causes especially significant harms on students who are already socially stigmatized. Efforts to ameliorate paradigm dissonance tend to focus on changing student dispositions or lowering the stakes of failure. I instead propose wise interventions that include analyzing the systemic roots of stigmatized failure and making failure a more communal experience. I then briefly address the systemic transformations necessary to cultivate generative failure more broadly

Cultivating the Flow of Community Literacy

Emerging from the keynote address at the inaugural Conference on Community Writing, this snapshot examines how an engaged infrastructure for community writing might operate as a flow-cultivation milieu. Such a milieu would facilitate self-determination, which suggests that people do their most compelling, rewarding, and innovative work when they exercise autonomy, pursue competence, and feel purpose; wise mentorship, in which mentors and mentees interrelate in an ongoing manner that supports mutually high expectations and achievements, and a listening stance that broadly distributes participation and shared learning. This snapshot also argues that, should an engaged infrastructure ever cease operating as a flow cultivation milieu, it should be dismantled

Telling students it\u27s o.k. To fail, but showing them it isn\u27t: Dissonant paradigms of failure in higher education

Educators increasingly extol failure as a necessary component of learning and growth. However, students frequently experience failure as a source of fear and anxiety that impedes risk-taking and experimentation. This essay examines the dissonance between these generative and stigmatized paradigms of failure, and it offers ideas for better negotiating this dissonance. After conceptualizing the two paradigms, I examine various factors that reinforce failure\u27s stigmatization. I emphasize precarious meritocracy, a neoliberal ethos driven by hypercompetitive individualism that makes success a zero-sum game, and that causes especially significant harms on students who are already socially stigmatized. Efforts to ameliorate paradigm dissonance tend to focus on changing student dispositions or lowering the stakes of failure. I instead propose wise interventions that include analyzing the systemic roots of stigmatized failure and making failure a more communal experience. I then briefly address the systemic transformations necessary to cultivate generative failure more broadly

Representing Network Trust and Using It to Improve Anonymous Communication

Motivated by the effectiveness of correlation attacks against Tor, the censorship arms race, and observations of malicious relays in Tor, we propose that Tor users capture their trust in network elements using probability distributions over the sets of elements observed by network adversaries. We present a modular system that allows users to efficiently and conveniently create such distributions and use them to improve their security. The major components of this system are (i) an ontology of network-element types that represents the main threats to and vulnerabilities of anonymous communication over Tor, (ii) a formal language that allows users to naturally express trust beliefs about network elements, and (iii) a conversion procedure that takes the ontology, public information about the network, and user beliefs written in the trust language and produce a Bayesian Belief Network that represents the probability distribution in a way that is concise and easily sampleable. We also present preliminary experimental results that show the distribution produced by our system can improve security when employed by users; further improvement is seen when the system is employed by both users and services.Comment: 24 pages; talk to be presented at HotPETs 201