conCEPTS that challenge our preCEPTs and perCEPTions

conCEPTS that challenge our preCEPTs and perCEPTions

Wysocki's prose is not easy to read.  Yet her ideas on "Opening New Media to Writing," are compelling and the exercises that follow her argument look like they would be fun.  What I found particularly interesting, however, are her ideas on how, "new technologies do not automatically erase or overthrow or change old practices," and that, quoting Cynthia Selfe,  in a "postmodern world, new media literacies may play an important role in identity formation, the exercise of power, and the negotiation of new social codes."  Wysocki asks us, "how the visual presentation of books "fits into and reinforces our cultural practices of authority, standardization, and mass production," and that we should ask questions of our texts.  There is that wonderful section where she asks, "How might the straight lines of type we have inherited on page after page of books articulate to other kinds of lines, assembly lines and lines of canned products in supermarkets and lines of desks in classrooms?  How might these various lines work together to accustom us to standardization, repetition, and other processes that support industrial forms of production? I'd like to extend this question not just the lines on the paper but the lines in the structure of the sentence and the lines in the structure of the paragraph.  If we are to allow, exercise and encourage producing or interpreting text on paper - let's look at the very sentence itself - the linear narrative that dominates our prose.  Quoting Wysocki, "If we are serious about seeing our positions in the texts we make for each other, then we'll need strategies for generous reading, strategies that include but also help us look beyond the naturalized rules and guidelines for how we present selves in print.  And since this is a fractured world I would like to show that fissure in not just the visual manifestation of the sentence but in its very word order.

For the "Arguing Rhetorically" I have assigned one group to put together a Web blog using the deliberative approach to the argument essay.  We are both in unfamiliar territory.  I have advised them to look over the chapter in the Allyn & Bacon on "Analyzing Images," and to look at design books on color, font sizes and other ways to communicate their messages.  I have advised them to write in chunks and to talk to each other, as in a conversation - a call and response.  We'll see how it goes.

Wysocki's exercises definitely help to break down precepts and help us to see differently.  I especially appreciated the activity for the visual argument and her comment to her students, "that there are not fixed definitions of what constitutes a "visual argument," so that they will have to work with what they understand "argument" and "the visual" to be--but...that the visual argument they build has to stand on its own.  Imagine that no right answer but discovery.

Digital Humanities, anyone?

This week’s readings kept reminding me of the digital humanities panel that we had on campus a few weeks ago and also the discussions we have had about technology in the classroom. My exploratory paper was actually trying to look into some of this new media as an aid to enhance learning in a writing classroom. Also, our next assignment is also related to new media, and I have had some heated debates with some of my friends about the use of new media in the classroom, which made it a more interesting reading week for me. Some of the exercises suggested Anne Frances Wysocki looked very interesting to me, and I would really like to use them in my classroom, and see if it works like it does for Wysocki’s classroom. I really thought the article by Wysocki was really clever. I am not sure if I understand the part about decreased emphasis on content and more emphasis on the medium, but I guess, when we are working with the new media, the rhetorical purpose of the medium and the form that the content uses becomes highly influential on the message/content’s overall reception. Of course, Wysocki wants us to emphasize new media more in our composition classroom, but it only comes out as an ulterior motive. The argument makes it seems like just the integration of new media into the classroom is not what Wycoski is ultimately preaching.

hooks is right!

I have been a big proponent of bell hooks’ ideas and got really excited when I saw the reading for the week. Of course, I got so excited about it that I forgot that I had to post a blog on the reading. So here I am, a little late, but with my input on the article. I had read this article about 2 years ago, when I was teaching at a very rural community college, and the idea of a multicultural, diverse student body had seemed like a distant, utopian dream. Here at MU, I have the opportunity to make more use of hooks’ advise about “making the classroom a democratic setting where everyone feels a responsibility to contribute to a central goal of transformative pedagogy” that is unavoidable in the 21^st century. Her idea of creating a learning environment that creates a sense of commitment and a common good that binds us is the ultimate ideal that we all should strive to achieve. The classroom for hooks’ seems to be more like a communal space where students should be open to share ideas that may not be considered non-threatening to classroom order, but this sharing of ideas, desire to learn, is what will enhance our intellectual development and our capacity to live more fully in the world. I have noted in my classrooms that the practice of making students write out their ideas and then share it with the class does help in subverting some of the racial, gender or class related inhibitions that may be there at the beginning of the semester.

The Rhetorical Situation of New Media

This week’s readings have been helpful for me in conceptualizing the multimodal assignment I would like to do next semester in my possible “Arguing Differently” focused English 1000 course. Specifically, I am interested in Anne Frances Wysocki’s focus on the materiality of all texts, as it reminds me that students need to be able to study texts-as-objects before they can begin to analyze and compose “traditional” and “new media” texts. In the classroom, I am interested in some of her shorter exercises, such as the “materialities of seeing” exercise in which a stranger walks into the classroom and students are asked to recall what they can about the individual or her “justifying choices” assignment, which asks students to literally analyze and reflect on ever material choice they make concerning formatting, placement, emphasis, paper size, font choice, color, etc. in a formal piece of writing. Along these same lines, I am interested in Cynthia Selfe’s lesson plans and suggested assignments for visual essays that not only include guidelines but also templates for student responses and a  follow-up reflection that asks designers/composers to judge their own success as creating a visual literacy narrative or visual argument.

With all of this said, I still found myself bogged down in Wycsocki’s jargon. Places where Wycsocki expresses what seems to be evident and accepted in Composition and Rhetoric and could therefore be expressed in a much more abbreviated fashion include passages such as the following:

But we do understand, now, that writing, like all literate practices, only exists because it functions, circulates, shifts, and has varying value and weight within complexly articulated social, cultural, political, educational, religious, economic, familial, ecological, political, artistic, affective, and technological webs (you can name others, I am sure)…. (second page)

But why would we need to because Wycsocki has taken it upon herself to name pretty much all the ones we could think of, all in an attempt to emphasize the complex matrix of the rhetorical situation. Here is another example involving the concept of “interactivity”:

Manovich’s words can encourage us to consider the various and complex relations we can construct with readers through the ways readers are asked to move through texts we build, whether that is by turning pages, clicking links, making conceptual connections between a photograph on one screen and poem on another, or solving a puzzle that opens the gate to the next level of a gametext. (page?)

I am probably being too critical here, but it seems like the notion of the audience’s interaction with the text (even at the level of materiality) goes back far enough that we don’t really need to re-establish it – I’m thinking Bakhtin here (many of you could probably name multiple other discussions). I do see why Wysocki feels it is necessary to argue that we “define ‘New Media Texts’ in terms of their materialities,” which essentially involves foregrounding materialities and forces us to consider the how and why of “new media” in the first place. In other words, Wysocki is encouraging us to be incredibly thoughtful in understanding how we design texts in multiple media because she maintains these texts situate us in the world.

In many ways, Selfe’s “taking up the challenges of visual literacy,” as the subtitle of her chapter states, continues the task of defining “visual literacy” and attempting to suggest a composition teacher’s approach toward this type of literacy, not as a new, hip composition-classroom novelty but instead as strategic broadening of “texts” and “literacy” in the twenty-first century. My main objection to Selfe is the same objection I had the first time I read Selfe in my Teaching Writing course at SLU. She chides those in “our profession” (which, I take to mean here those in the field of Composition and Rhetoric but also in the broader studies of the English Department in general) for being suspicious of visual forms. She writes “When English composition teachers have thought to bring visual forms into their classes—a practice which they have carried on for at least forty years – they have typically presented them as second-class texts: either as ‘dumbed down’ (32) communications that serve as ‘stimuli for writing but […] no substitute for the complexity of language’ (22) or as texts related to, but certainly not on an equal footing with, the “’real’ work of the course.” Let’s face it -- I think reservations from some in the field have a point. Visual texts do communicate in different ways from the written word. This doesn’t mean they’re less valuable, it just means they are going to emphasize different things. Even more so, however, I think Selfe should allow for the fact that there are entire departments (namely Studio Art and Design and its many related fields) that precisely solely deal in “visual literacy” (though, I doubt they would refer to it as “literacy”), which begs the question of why, exactly, English composition teachers should be pushing so hard for appropriating those techniques entirely.  These questions become even clearer when I consider that for all of the “visual literacy” assignments Selfe suggests, there is always a reflective element that forces designers/composers and audience/viewer to translate into words how affective a specific visual presentation is based on categories that sound awfully close to the types of standards we apply to written texts (impact, coherence, salience, organization). Obviously, I see the benefit of focusing on “visual literacy” to some extent and plan to do so both this semester and next. But I keep kicking myself for not asking Selfe these questions in person when I met her last March at the CCCC. She’s a delightfully nice woman, by the way.

What did you all think of the exercises in Wysocki?

Has anyone tried to do a version of any of the exercises in “Opening New Media To Writing” by Anne Frances Wysocki? The postcard one is the most familiar and seems to work the best. I was going to have students bring in their our photographs when we get to the last unit (creating a visual essay). For homework they will have previously read a chapter from Roland Barthes Camera Lucinda and we were going to talk about images and their meanings. I think there are some similarities between this activity and the one Wysocki suggests, and I think it could work well, but it's the others that I have concerns about, especially the eye-witnessing one. I don't know about students in any of your classes, but mine don't take well to classes that are structured out of the ordinary. Although the activity does seem entertaining, I'd be worried that after all was said and done, the students wouldn't be able to make the connection with the concept trying to be expressed. I mean, maybe. That's why I'm curious if anyone has done something like this? Is anyone considering doing this exercise in their own class? What do you all think?

New Media Literacy

Very clever Wysocki... To take something scary and exclusive like "new media" and to incorporate both digital and print mediums into a larger, inclusive definition is a very smart move. I find myself thinking back to a presentation I attended with Dr. Kathleen Hayle (who is a wonderful person by the way and one of the front runners of post-humanism literary theory). Hayle discussed how English departments needed to move away from the traditional demarcation of different literary periods in time periods (Renaissance, Medieval, modern, victorian etc.) and instead move to a medium based approach. Thus, instead of saying I was studying Renaissance literature, I might study the manuscript, or the early printing press media etc. I think it is a bit of a pipe dream and I am not sure what this new arrangement offers but I think it would sit well with Wysocki. It seems that Wysocki wants us to spend less time arguing over content and more time examining how the medium and form the content is displayed on effects the message within. I don't know if my summary makes sense, but I like the heart behind Wysocki's message.

Why do I have everything left justified in my paper.

Why
        does
               every
                       word
                               follow
                                       the last
                                                   ?

Nonetheless I always fall back to the form I know and am comfortable with at the end of the day, but it is interesting to think about. We think about form, style and format in poetry but rarely in composition class (as Anne rightly points out). I like that Wysocki is not just trying to get digital media infused into the composition course, although of course that is a sub-objective. Instead, she is trying to ask us to recognize the constrictive force of medium and form on our writing regardless of whether we acknowledge it or not, so we might as well acknowledge it. In that vein I thought the crayon activity was awesome (pg. 27)! Any activity that uncovers cultural pre-conditioning (crayons are childish and silly) is a favorite of mine. I am not sure how the subsequent exercises would go over in class (redesign the computer for cockroaches?). I also thought the idea of a visual argument showcase with the students rotating between pieces and guessing at the arguments was really interesting and something I might try when I transition into my unit IV multi-model argument.

Selfe seemed to be playing off of Wysocki's same arguments. I thought that her evaluation hand-outs were really interesting and would probably work really well in a peer review situation (they were visual themselves, which was interesting). I also thought her assignment that adapted a research paper and transformed it into a visual argument was very similar to what I plan on suggesting for my students multimodel essay. Overall, I thought these readings were both theoretically rigorous and very practical!

Now, I dare someone to blog on this article just using visual media!

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.