the embodied playbook

Reviewed by by Lorin Shellenberger, Georgia Tech

8 january 2019 archive

It's a familiar story: the struggling college athlete, while a star on the field, can't seem to hack it in the classroom, and leaves school after just a year. While J. Michael Rifenburg's The Embodied Playbook: Writing Practices of Student Athletes opens with this oft-heard anecdote, he follows it with the story of a more successful student-athlete who manages to leverage his bodily, on-court learning to help him in the classroom. Building on these two stories, Rifenburg incorporates a year-long ethnographic case study of the University of North Georgia men's basketball team, along with an examination of the athletics and university-wide writing centers at the University of Oklahoma, to consider how student-athletes learn scripted plays and how this learning might help inform writing instructors' teaching practices. Using this research, Rifenburg makes the less-familiar, though convincing, argument that understanding the bodily learning practices of student-athletes would improve writing instruction for all students.

Rifenburg begins his study by acknowledging the current challenges that student-athletes and those that work with them face when it comes to academic literacy. For example, Rifenburg points out that writing instructors and programs "do not often privilege bodily literacy in writing-intensive spaces like an FYC [first-year composition] classroom or a writing center," which then results in viewing student-athletes through a deficit model where the focus is on "what they cannot do" and "what they don't know" (4, emphasis in original). Instead, Rifenburg argues "compositionists can better work with student-athlete writers by understanding their prior knowledge, a prior knowledge honed through bodily engagement with text and through writing practices that privilege the body as a central mode of meaning making" (5). To further complicate matters, Rifenburg notes athletic departments and academic departments are frequently distrustful of each other and unsure of how to work together, which typically results in separate support services for student athletes. Meanwhile, the NCAA provides only the vaguest of guidelines regarding support services for student athletes. All of these factors, Rifenburg argues, means that academic and athletic support services at best don't utilize what student-athletes know, and at worst, use outdated, ineffective writing pedagogy that only serves to further alienate student-athlete literacies. Following the introduction, the book is divided into two sections, which focus on knowing student-athletes and teaching student-athletes, respectively. Using Patricia Bizzell's claim that the heart of composition studies is a desire to know who our students are, Rifenburg focuses first on how we might come to know our student-athletes and their writing practices. Chapter two, "What Are Plays and What Do They Do? A Textual Analysis of Football and Basketball Plays" examines how coaches and players construct plays and what plays do for those who use them. Rifenburg defines plays as "multimodal texts, dialectically constructed, historically situated, and anticipative of competitive bodily enactment" (25). Rifenburg examines the playbooks of football programs such as Auburn University, including how these plays are utilized in games, whether by hand signals, numbers, diagrams, or picture cues on placards. What is significant here in Rifenburg's discussion is his understanding of plays as texts, and consequently, his positioning of student-athletes as always-already authors and collaborators of texts with a rhetorical savviness they are not often credited with.

Chapter three, "How Do Student-Athletes Learn Plays? A Case Study of a Division II Men's Basketball Team," incorporates data from Rifenburg's year-long case study of the University of North Georgia men's basketball team, where Rifenburg observed practices, games, tape sessions, and other team events in order to understand how coaches teach plays and how players learn them. Rifenburg identifies three cognitive processes through which student-athletes learn plays: spatial orientation, haptic communication, and scaffolded situations. Noting that many plays are never actually written down, Rifenburg illustrates the importance of considering student-athletes' bodily learning using the example of a basketball player who could not identify a play drawn by his teammate. Later, when considering his positioning on the court and his teammates' movements, the same player correctly identified the play and his corresponding positioning within it. In another powerful example of collaboration, Rifenburg highlights a day of practice in which a set play was revised by the coaching staff, and a seasoned player suggested a similar revision to another set play. In Rifenburg's most convincing argument, he emphasizes not only the embodied nature of student-athlete learning, but also the collaborative nature of their literacy practices.

The second section focuses on teaching student-athletes, with chapter four specifically addressing student-athlete learning within athletics-sponsored support services. In "How Can we Better Teach Our Student-Athlete Writers (Part 1)? A Narrative of a Division I Writing Center," Rifenburg incorporates his experience working at the athletics-sponsored writing center at the University of Oklahoma. Out of an extreme fear of academic misconduct, many athletic departments have started providing separate academic support services for athletes, including writing tutoring. However, as Rifenburg notes, this tutoring often looks a lot different for student-athletes than for the general student body population, who might receive writing tutoring at a university-sponsored writing center which is available to all students. Using his experience as a tutor at UO's athletics-sponsored writing center, as well as interviews with athletic support staff and university-sponsored writing center staff, Rifenburg argues that in an attempt to prevent accusations of academic misconduct, athletics-sponsored writing center staff focus on archaic methods of writing instruction, such as marking student errors, instead of the collaborative, writer-led pedagogical practices utilized at most university-sponsored writing centers. Though it's tempting to blame these ineffective teaching methods on NCAA regulations, Rifenburg argues that the NCAA's vague mandates are actually in the best interests of student-athletes and writing support staff because they allow—and even encourage—student athletes to receive the same (not separate) types of support as other students. The problem, according to Rifenburg, is that athletics support staff and writing center staff do not always work together, and that neither group does enough to acknowledge and integrate the writing literacies that student-athletes already utilize in their respective sports.

In the final chapter, "How Can We Better Teach Our Student-Athlete Writers (Part 2)? Writing Practices as Jazzy, Creative, Collaborative," Rifenburg brings together his experience at Auburn, UO, and North Georgia and returns to the three cognitive processes discussed in chapter three, drawing comparisons between the embodied action of student-athletes as they enact plays and the collaborative, bodily activity of jazz improvisation. As Rifenburg argues, "both athletics and jazz capture mind-body collaborative creation in ever-changing circumstances" (130). Using the ideas of soloing and supporting common in jazz improvisation, Rifenburg contends that both student-athletes and jazz musicians use touch and feel to "rely on the continual coordination of their bodies with others," with the goal of dynamic synchronization (138-139). In the writing classroom, this "invites us to consider how to construct a framework for writers and writing reliant on the voices of others and on knowing when to let others' voices speak before, instead of, or after our own" (141). In this final chapter, then, Rifenburg points to how writing instructors might incorporate what student-athletes already know about text and improvisation in order to support an idea of writing as collaborative and embodied.

Overall, Rifenburg offers a compelling argument for acknowledging and incorporating the literate practices of student-athletes. Not since Julie Cheville's Minding the Body: What Student-Athletes Know About Learning (2001) has a writing studies scholar so thoroughly addressed the disconnect between the learning valued in an athletic realm and that valued in the classroom. His strongest contribution is his assertion that it is not just student-athletes that make meaning through their bodies, but that "through learning about our student athletes, through learning how they understand text through their bodies, we learn about a great number of our students" (29). Anyone who routinely works with student-athletes will find this book appealing and refreshing, especially those that work specifically with student-athletes and writing. Though Rifenburg was obviously limited by his focus on football and basketball plays, more attention to "plays" in other sports, along with the corresponding discussion of what might constitute a "text," would further enrich how writing instructors think about literacy and literate practices. For example, a long-jumper who adjusts her run up after missing the board is responding to a particular rhetorical situation that affects its composition (Rifenburg's definition of a play), though one might not typically think of this response as a "play" or the long-jump board as a collaborator. Would Rifenburg consider this to be a play, and the resulting change to the long jumper's approach to be a text? Without a fuller discussion of plays in other sports and what Rifenburg considers a "text," the potential applications for this study are left at the more obvious written plays like those in basketball and football. In addition, Rifenburg could certainly have incorporated more rhetorical theory in connection to his points on what and how student-athletes learn, which would appeal more broadly to those in writing studies and rhetoric and composition. My critique here is simply that I think Rifenburg could have done more with this study, but what he has done is thorough, intriguing, and compelling, and anyone who works with student-athletes would do well to add it to their resources.

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