Ever Get the Feeling You've Been Cheated? Edupunk and Subculture. Part One

So as far as I can tell, this whole Edupunk thing started with this blog post here from Jim Groom. And although I’m partly wary of entering a discussion over what is more of a meme than a movement at this point, there has been some interesting discussion over the past week about what exactly this term could mean. It’s hard to give a still-forming term an exact definition, but:

Edupunk is (or might be)

– a DIY movement that "favors technical accessibility over grand design" (Caufield)

– "instructional use of blogs, wikis, various mashups, and podcasting among many other uses of emerging technologies" (Wikipedia)

– the "rejection of efforts by government and corporate interests in using emerging technologies to exercise control over education" (Wikipedia)

– the tendency of influential educational companies like Blackboard to co-opt and repackage Web 2.0 apps and offering them as their own

– "student-centered, resourceful, teacher or community-created rather than corporate-sourced, and underwritten by a progressive political stance" (Stephen Downes)

There’s some good here. The use of social media in classrooms and the emphasis on production are certainly actions I can get behind. But something about this Edupunk idea seems off to me. Here’s my attempt to work it out.

First off I’ve got to tackle the title itself. Not only because words matter, but because if you wanted to demonstrate words’ tendency to be historically, culturally, and socially situated with a resulting multiplicity of interpretations . . . well, you could do a lot worse than choosing the word "punk." Suffice to say that someone’s reading of that word always ends up saying a hell of a lot more about them than it does any firm defining of what punk is or was. The word choice is sure to inflame passions and opinions precisely because its such a slippery signifier (and if you chart the conversations so far, this is exactly what has happened). If Groom thought this out, I’m sure that’s the main reason he choose to go there. The word choice almost ensures conversation and debate and for that I could never fault it. But there’s no doubt the word brings baggage and divisiveness. If the choice is intended to do more than spark emotion, I have to wonder what benefits the label brings.

Without seeking to define too many specific qualities, I feel safe saying that punk was a subcultural movement born out of a specific historical and social context. Like any movement it’s a mistake to think that punks built anything totally new from scratch. In other words, they took the materiality and philosophies of so-called "straight" culture and reappropriated them into new meanings (for example: punk reconfigured such symbols as metal combs, motor scooters, the Union Jack, the safety pin, etc.). On the semiotic level of remixing culture into new meanings and possibilities, I quite like the notion of a "punk" style to education. I just doubt that this is the main sense in which the word is being used (and punks were far from the first group to do this, so again, why them?).

As Dick Hebdige suggested in his seminal "Subculture: The Meaning of Style," the straight culture always responds back– sending the subculture through a cycle of trivialization, naturalization, and ultimate domestication. Those "original" punks that lament the rise of the "Hot Topic" punk fail to realize that all subcultures go through this cycle. If the subculture had any real legs, it’s already sowed seeds and morphed into something else by the time the so-called "masses" and future generations come along and try to catch up. Perhaps most importantly, I would agree with Hebdige that this process is not something to lament; if for no other reason, it simply is going to happen. Corporations may be showing increasing interest in Web 2.0 technology– and they may often approach them in ways that longtime or early adopters view as off or bastardized– but their doing so is ultimately part of a social cycle that is necessary for the original ideas to grow or progress.

The subculture always comes with an air of elitism, a certain distrust of popularity, and a very modern fear of the masses (or shall I say, of the construction of something called the masses). And this is not critique, for I think subcultures are important and these qualities act as a certain social glue that produces identity and belonging amongst the subculture’s members. But these are also part of the reason subcultures like punk are always doomed to eventually scatter. Even if the values and beliefs of punk had been adopted by large numbers of people (this assumes that even the original members could agree on what those values and beliefs were) in a manner that the original members did not view as co-opting or impure, the punk movement still would have fallen apart. The subculture occupies a very strange place. It is full of people claiming to have a better way, a better method, a better philosophy– but only a select few are capable of interpreting or embodying it properly. The subcultural movement is a special kind of movement that advocates social change without actually wanting it to happen on any grand scale.

All this for me to suggest that "Edupunk" is a curiously backwards looking term for a supposed movement that supposedly seeks to look forward. As many of the Edupunk critiques have already pointed out: there really isn’t anything new in its philosophy or pedagogy so far. Again, not a problem– nothing can make a claim to complete newness. But since there is nothing new here, I think it’s safe to suggest that the labeling is perhaps the only relevant feature (and therefore I don’t think I’m simply linguistically knit-picking). The term chooses to not only align itself with the idea of subculture, but with the most idealistic notion of subculture– an ideal that posits an us against them mentality at odds with the dialectic relationship between the perceived opposing forces. Is this a mindset we want to bring to education?