‘Woz Way’ aims at expanding traditional definitions

Do you know where you live? No, this is not a trick question. You know your own address and phone number, but you may not know much about the place you call home.

Sometimes bus conversations can be revealing about where people think they live. One San José State University student heard a bus passenger summarize her home town in this way: “I like to go to San Francisco. San Francisco is a lot of fun. It has a lot of history. San José has no history.”

Philip Wander and Andrew Wood, faculty members in the communication studies department at San José State University, have been helping their students to understand how people talk about their home town, to uncover both local history and to learn how that history is constructed, maintained and revised through talk. Wander teaches a course titled, “The Rhetoric of San José,” and his purpose, as he put it, is “We want the students to find out what San José is, what it means to them and to the people who live here.”

Students do research projects on items of interest to them in San José history. They learn how to gather information, often through interviewing techniques, and how to shape the information they’ve gathered into a coherent narrative. They also learn how to make sense of what people tell them, through rhetorical analysis of the texts of their interviews.

Ultimately, these are scholarly pieces, but they are written in a style that veers between journalistic narrative and autobiography. Wander encourages students to develop a voice and to use that voice to tell a story, often critically.

Part of the process, however, is to share the stories with the community as a whole. Enter Wood, a relatively new faculty member at San José State, and Wander’s office-mate. Wood’s expertise is in new communication technologies, and the two decided to create an electronic journal for the stories that were being created in the course. The two titled the site “Woz Way,” after a San José street named for Apple Computer and Silicon Valley founder Steve Wozniak. The journal is located at http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/commstudies/woz/.

“We’ve always imagined that Woz Way extends the classroom beyond its brick and mortar walls,” said Wood. “As a corollary, our opportunities for collaboration with students extends beyond the traditional ‘sage on the stage model.’ Crafting this site with our students, we imagine Woz Way as a community of scholars. Some have just had more time to make more mistakes than others.”

Wander and Wood planned the site to be interactive: not only do they post student work, but they encourage readers to send in comments and memorabilia as well. A local columnist for the San José Mercury News has written about the site, and student authors have received e-mails from residents and former residents commenting on the stories, offering other sources of information, or just thanking the writers for providing reminders of days gone by.

An essay by Judie Pulgarin on the history of the Century 21 movie theatre complex provides an example of material appearing on the site. Pulgarin’s essay described the Century 21 complex in detail and discussed how it developed from a single, wrap-around theatre that hosted “premium” film showings to a complex of theatres offering first-run screenings in addition to the “premium” films. She traced how the film-going experience had changed at the theatres and explained how the theatres marketed themselves. She also included material about how film influences the development of culture and how particular films (such as one about information technology) could resonate with a San José audience. She even researched the controversy that the complex generated when the sound system resonated into the nearby neighborhood and found how the neighbors had managed to protect themselves from intrusion by film-goers.

Wander and Wood see this project as a way of combating the elitism of traditional scholarship. “For us, Woz Way provides an opportunity to question the notion of scholarship as an exercise of the elite. Our students are working class scholars with keen insights on the stuff of many academic debates. This project simply expands the forum,” said Wood.

In fact, the project has been so encouraging that it has spawned another: with colleagues Dennis Jaehne, Rona Halualani, Hanns Hohmann and Wenshu Lee the group intends to launch a second on-line journal, titled Cyber Studies. Jaehne will edit the first issue, on the theme of eco-feminism, and as with Woz Way, the group welcomes suggestions for topics and contributions.