[witty visual literacy title]

                I am very interested in visual literacy, and whether and to what extent it should be taught in the college composition classroom.  I agree with many of the sentiments expressed by Selfe, in particular the increased presence of visually relayed messages in mainstream culture.  However, as much as I enjoy teaching visual literacy, and as important as I believe it is for students to learn, I am plagued by a number of questions.  Is it possible to find a balance between the teaching of visual literacy and traditional “alphabet” based literacy in the composition classroom?  Is it worth teaching visual literacy if it means sacrificing, in any way, the teaching of traditional literacy?  Does our teaching of visual literacy undermine, or better yet, completely shift our purposes and goals in teaching composition?

                On a practical level, I was struck by Selfe’s discussion of teacher preparedness to actually teach visual literacy, and not just the ability read and interpret visual texts, but to create and compose them as well.  I am definitely not as computer savvy as I once was, and I am totally out of touch with many of the computer programs Selfe mentions in the article.  If we teach students about rhetoric and composition by having them do it themselves, then it makes sense that we would use the same approach to teaching visual literacy – we would have student compose multimedia and multimodal documents.  But as I have mentioned, I am not sufficiently prepared to assist students in using these more advanced computer programs to design such documents.