Visual vs. Digital Learning

So before I go into what I gleaned from this week's articles, I do have a bone to pick here first. While I am completely pro-non-conventional learning in the Composition classroom, and while I agree whole-heartedly with Wysocki's proclamation that "This shift from print to the computer does not mean the end of literacy," I wonder how we can be expected to teach digital literacy to our students when the University of Missouri does not provide adequate digital technologies in our classrooms. I teach in a classroom with a chalkboard--not even a whiteboard--and in order to hook up my laptop to project YouTube clips, movies, or even Blackboard, I had to purchase a $30 Mac adapter from my own very limited funds. Although I realize that other classrooms may have a different setup, the reason why I personally am not assigning a digital component to my course this semester is because I feel that it is unfair for students to be expected to complete an assignment where they are not given the proper resources. If they created a digital presentation, for example, how could they present it to the class? They would have to bring in their own laptop, and what if it did not adapt to the projector system, or something else went awry? Without a reliable setup, there are too many variables, and I value my students' time more than that.

With that being said, I did feel that the articles provided alternative ways of thinking about visual learning in a non-digital sense that could be used in classrooms with limited resources. The Selfe article, for instance, defines visual literacy as "the ability to read, understand, value, and learn from visual materials (still photographs, videos, films, animations, still images, pictures, drawings, graphics)--especially as these are combined to create a text--as well as the ability to create, combine, and use visual elements (e.g. colors, forms, lines, images) and messages for the purposes of communicating." This definition seems like a much more open-ended assessment of visual learning that even a classroom with limited resources could handle. I also found that some of the exercises provided by the Wysocki article-- such as the one suggesting students write with crayons and other types of writing tools--to be interesting activities in that they offer students a way to think about the visual element of writing, which often gets left behind.

I find that this translates directly to my idea of integrating poetry into the Composition classroom. Poetry is an extremely visual form of writing, and unlike prose, the shape and form of how a poem looks on the page is very important. In my multimodel project, I created a Pinterest board with ideas. Some of them deal with the visual literacy that reading and writing poetry can provide. One of them shows how you can "cut up" the words of long poems to create other ones. Another suggests thinking of a sonnet in terms of the visual structure of an envelope. I don't know what kind of classroom I will be teaching in next semester, but I appreciate articles and ideas that can teach students visual literacy without having to necessarily rely on digital technology.