Intro
Michael: This is
Sherita: Write.
Chris: Think.
Genevieve: Teach.
Michael: A podcast brought to you by the Writing Across the Curriculum, a program in the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing at The Ohio State University.
Episode Script
Michael Rifenburg: I don't think student athletes have professors that talk to them much about their sports. There's certainly the jersey chasers that will chase down the star football player, the star quarterback and kind of hound that person. But the men's tennis player? The women's golf player who's putting in just the same kind of hard hours and getting that in? They love when faculty are there. They love when faculty ask.
Michael Blancato: Welcome to Write. Think. Teach. I’m Michael Blancato.
Min-seok Choi: And I’m Min-seok Choi.
Michael: According to a report released by the NCAA last October, a record-setting 494,992 students participated in NCAA sports last year. At Ohio State alone, over 1,000 students compete in dozens of sports. Moreover, revenue and expenses for Ohio State’s athletic department each crossed $200 million dollars for the first time in the 2018 fiscal year. These numbers testify to an Ohio State culture where sports play a prominent role in the university. The athletic and academic identities of schools like Ohio State can sometimes be seen as in tension with one another. As writing instructors, we may be able to play a role in reducing the tension between athletic and academic pursuits, and even approach athletes as valuable sources that can positively inform the academic missions of universities. To learn more about the challenges and insights student athletes bring with them to college writing classrooms, our guest this week is J. Michael Rifenburg.
Min-seok Choi : Michael is an Associate Professor of English and director of first-year composition at the University of North Georgia. He locates his research interests in student communities that, in his words, “operate on the periphery of college campuses” and engage in “cool forms of writing that we can learn about.” It is this interest in peripheral student communities that drew him toward working with student athletes for his book The Embodied Playbook, released last year through Utah State University Press. Michael explains how his interest in learning about the writing practices of student athletes grew out of his experiences working with athletes, such as a particular star recruit, in first-year writing courses at Auburn University.
Michael Rifenburg: So we're downstairs bottom floor of the library late one summer, hot Alabama summer, and I come up behind one of these star recruits. A high name recruit football player, freshman wide receiver. All the boosters, all the fans were super excited about this guy. And he's typing out a paper about success strategies. He's typing it in Notepad. And he's going key to key, very slowly. I said, “Hey, why don't you pull up Word?” “What are you talking about?” And so I show him where Microsoft Word is, I help them make sense of the assignment, help him make sense of navigating some very functional computer literacy. And at that moment, it just struck me that he has a lot of challenges in front of him. But he also knows some really super cool stuff. This is the same guy that's going to memorize over 400 plays for the football team. And at the drop of a hat, with some sort of clandestine signals, going to run them in front of 90,000 people. He's got some cool stuff going on. How can we connect with that and help him in the classroom? All of that wasn't running through my head at the moment. At the moment, I was just more like, “Wow, this is tough.” But as I've kept thinking about it for over a decade, I think that's what was going through my mind and the question I wanted to pursue. So I’m doing three things in this book. I just want to learn what are football plays and basketball plays. What are these plays? How do student athletes learn them? And what might that mean for people that work in a writing-intensive space, like a first-year competition classroom? Like a writing center?
Michael Blancato: For Michael, sports offer interesting and perhaps illustrative parallels to the work we ask students to do in writing classrooms. He talks about these parallels within the context of bodily literacy, learning through the use of our bodies.
Michael Rifenburg: I'm talking about finding ways to connect with how we learn knowledge, and engage knowledge through our body, and what that might look like in a traditional academic classroom. So one big principle I found about how student athletes learn plays is the importance of coordinating yourself in relation to somebody else. That’s so much of it for me. If, let's say, we're playing a sport, right now. We're playing basketball together. I'm worried about where you are. If you're on my team or not on my team, I'm coordinating my body in relationship to yours. Which is exactly what we're doing in academic writing. So let's push that metaphor a little farther. Let's do something like making a roster where we have all the sources we want to use...we're going to cite this scholar, that scholar. And why don't we start looking at what are the strengths and weaknesses of those? So this scholar brings this to the table, the scholar brings this to the table. This rhetorical concept will be really important at this part of my paper. And so we're looking at connecting ourselves in relation to other concepts. And we can take that one step further by putting these on post-it notes and moving post-it notes around. There's a lot of great apps for that. Even getting post-it notes. But I think one big principle I found that is so important, is that basketball players and football players, they know where to be based on where other people are. Which is exactly what we're doing in academic writing.
Min-seok Choi: Many students athletes, especially those involved in team sports, spend a significant amount of time studying and engaging playbooks. Unfortunately, students’ interactions with these playbooks is often treated as separate from the work they do in writing classrooms. Michael proposes that writing instructors and researchers see playbooks as objects worthy of critical attention to better understand the literacy practices of student athletes as well as help instructors make deeper connections between students’ athletic and academic pursuits.
Michael Rifenburg: I’m making the argument that student athletes are coming into the classroom, like any student athlete, with a lot of prior knowledge about writing. And I think that prior knowledge is clearly codified in a playbook. Sometimes they are digitally kept. Sometimes they're kept as a physical copy. So if we want to know what the student athletes are coming to us with, we got to look at the text that they're engaging with. They're engaging with this publicly, they're engaged in it successfully. If only 3% of the 7.7 million high school football players come play at the college level, they're doing this really, really well. So let's look at the text they're engaging with.
Michael Blancato: In addition to helping him develop a greater understanding of the pedagogical value of playbooks, Michael’s work with student athletes has also given him a deeper appreciation of the time constraints these students face. Because academic and athletic experiences are treated as separate and conflicting aspects of students’ lives, instructors sometimes ignore the time limitations placed upon student athletes. To address this tension, Michael encourages instructors to adopt positions of flexibility and understanding.
Michael Rifenburg: I feel like I have a stronger awareness of how much time restrictions are placed upon them. They might not be able to come to my office from two to three because they have to be in the weight room, they have to be in practice, they'll be on a bus driving to an away game. It's really hard for a student athlete to come and talk to you during your office hours because their schedule is so regimented, where they need to be. So if anything, I think it's just more of a flexibility and understanding how much time constraints they're operating under.
Min-seok Choi: Michael’s research suggests that one way instructors can build better connections with student athletes is to simply talk to them about their experiences participating in college sports.
Michael Rifenburg: I think that gave me an interest in just wanting to know more about the students and just wanting to know more about their sports, their practices, their bus rides, how the team's going, how did that game go. I don't think student athletes have professors that talk to them much about their sports. There's certainly the jersey chasers that will chase down the star football player, the star quarterback and kind of hound that person. But the men's tennis player? The women's golf player who's putting in just the same kind of hard hours and getting that in? They love when faculty are there. They love when faculty ask. And so much of what I love about the field of rhetoric and composition is we want to know who our students are. And that's not my line. That's a great line Pat Bizzell has in a PMLA article: “We just want to who our students are.” I just want to hear about what's going on in your life outside of this classroom. And I think they really appreciate hearing that.
Michael Blancato: Thanks to J. Michael Rifenburg to sharing his work and ideas with us. We hope that this episode has given you some ideas about how acknowledging and integrating insights from playbooks and athletes themselves can address some of the tensions between athletics and academics that may exist on college campuses. For more about Michael’s work on student athletes, check out his book The Embodied Playbook. We will post a link to a sample chapter in the transcript for this episode. Thanks for listening to this episode of Write. Think. Teach.
Note: J. Michael Rifenburg’s last name is pronounced Rye-fin-burg, not Riff-fin-burg. Write. Think. Teach. regrets the error.