“Do We Teach to Life or to College?”

In “Box-logic,” Geoffrey Sirc proposes a new media pedagogy that values annotation and collection as a means of composing multimedia texts. Like other scholars, such as Wysocki and Selfe who are interested in using new technologies in the composition classroom, Sirc voices his “pedagogical dilemma:” “just what do I do in the classroom, what do I teach (111)?” As he moves away from the essayistic genre that carries with it the legacy of linear thinking, he considers the "formal and material concerns [that] guide a newly-mediated pedagogical practice" (114)—a pedagogy that values association, “desire and lack,” metonymy, aesthetics, “personal symbologies(cool term, but huh?),” juxtaposition, and design (117). For Sirc, the student writer is a "dissatisfied collector, one impatiently seeking pleasure" (117).

  

“The Arcades Project” Activity is 

a very informative yet entertaining

genre/ activity. I like how Sirc allows students

to break away from “doing old-fashioned note cards

for the term paper,” and adopt a much more interesting format.

I find Sirc’s theory and pedagogy of box logic interesting and inspiring, but I’m not sure how much writing (actual writing, how much of the 20-page requirement) do students write in the freshman comp course based on this pedagogy. If the focus on this pedagogy is collection and annotation then what students actually learn is researching, summarizing, and responding to entries (quotes, images, sound, songs, etc.), what happens after that? I mean, what happens when we ask students to write an essay? Do they know how to do so?  I agree with Sirc when he writes that there is "something increasingly untenable about the integrated coherence of college essayist prose" (123) in the 21^st century, but shouldn’t writing teachers focus on the basics (mastering the “traditional” essay) first and then, when students master that, we can take them to another level? Perhaps his pedagogy can be more useful with juniors since there is an underlying assumption that they know how to write “homogenous” essays. 

Sirc claims that the composition essay hides behind an "easy falseness of a unified resolution" (123). Do we really believe that? I know that many of us think of our students’ “final” drafts as first drafts and that we highly value the process of wallowing in the complexity of the topic. I think that Sirc here oversimplified what a comp essay entails. Also, I find it problematic that Sirc doesn’t take into consideration that students need to learn how to write a 10-page well-argued essay in order to survive and pass other classes that rely on comp teachers to teach students how to write a well-argued essay. 

 If each teacher works individually without considering the consequences of their adopted pedagogies/models, then, we are jeopardizing the students’ success in her academic life/college life so we could teach her something about life. This is not to deny the importance of Sirc’s model, as I said, I find the box model for the early stages of writing essays and researching, what Sirc calls "search strategies and annotating material" (122), particularly useful. And I’m a strong believer in empowering students in finding their own voices in writing, but if we want to translate Sirc’s model into a more realistic one that correspondences to the requirements of our comps classes, we should work on a comprehensive vision that values experimentation and nonlinear thinking and redefines essayistic prose not only on the college level, but also on the university level so students would not be at a disadvantage. Unfortunately, on the university level, the "genre" of note-taking/collaging/archiving, etc. is not as prominent as the genre of the argumentative essay. I think that the university is far from adopting the box-logic model as a primary model for its freshmen level comp classes.

My “Readerly” Experience of Sorapure’s piece

I think that Sorapure’s “Five Principles of New Media: Or, Playing Lev Manovich” is a true manifestation of the marriage of theory and practice, and how multimedia can teach and entertain us simultaneously. It was an interesting experience reading this scholarly article and interacting with the text. As noted from the title, Sorapure’s piece illustrates the five principles of new media as articulated in Lev Manovich’s book, using multimedia technology. While reading this piece, I spent most of my time figuring out how to read it, deciphering the visual images, clicking all over the images, reading the students’ examples, looking for possible hidden directions/clues here and there, and making choices during the interaction. For example, when I was reading the definition of the first principle "numerical representation," I was impressed with this principle at work! I was moving the mouse over the image and I was watching the mouse coordinates change, while the eye in the background was gazing at me. The interaction between me (the reader) and the text played out visibly on the keyboard and on the screen. What usually takes place in my mind while reading a printed text was visible and external.

The one thing that I didn’t do well, I think, was reading the alphabetical text because the interactive part was far more engaging and sometimes distracting, which made me wonder if I had enough training reading interactive texts to do so effectively. Sorapure comments on the challenges that she faced in composing this article. She writes:

“This article is itself a new media composition, and the five principles described by Manovich certainly can be seen here. There are also some unique challenges involved in composing an academic article in Photoshop and Flash, in combining almost 3500 words of text with graphics and interactivity.”

“Aside from the matter of coding and designing the article, the most difficult challenge for me has been presenting text in a way that's detailed and yet compact, with short independent units combining to form a coherent argument and with interactivity that enhances rather than distracts from the text.”

I wanted to learn more about these challenges as I felt that Sorapure cut this discussion short (for formatting reasons, maybe? Would she have done the same if this article was a traditional one?). How can we prepare our students for these challenges? Are these challenges unique to multimedia texts? From a pedagogical perspective, I feel that managing time should be one of the challenges since, obviously, Sorapure's article represents hours of hard work (there are a great number of images and codes embedded in this article). Also, this article shows great literacy and competency in designing and composing new media texts. Where do we draw the line between experimenting with form and disorienting or distracting the reader? While reading (is reading the right word? Should we substitute it with browsing?) I was tempted to click on the link that said “You can also read a text-only version of the article in PDF format,” but I resisted doing so to experience this multimedia text in its fullest potential. As I was nostalgic to read an essayistic text, I was reminded with Clark’s thesis in “Making the Case for a 21st-Century Pedagogy:”

“In our nascent digital culture, the traditional essayistic literacy that still dominates composition classes is outmoded and needs to be replaced by an intentional pedagogy of digital rhetoric which emphasizes the civic importance of education, the cultural and social imperative of ‘the now,’ and the ‘cultural software’ that engages students in the interactivity, collaboration, ownership, authority, and malleability of texts” (1).

Interesting choice of words! Why did she use the words “imperative,” “outmoded” and “replace,” not “incorporate?” Why do scholars believe that in order to push their agenda forward they need to trash the current practices and call them “outmoded” and “traditional?” Although I found interacting with Sorapure’s article engaging and original, my readerly experience was interrupted, which makes me wonder if I’m ready for Clark’s “pedagogy of digital rhetoric.”

What's New about "New Media?"

In “Openings and Justifications,” Anne Wysocki  defines “new media texts” as those “made by composers who are aware of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight [that] materiality”(15). Her definition of “new media texts” requires attentiveness in designing texts to acknowledge the fact that “any text—like its composers and readers—doesn’t function independently of how it is made and in what contexts” (15). Wysocki’s understanding of “new media” extends it beyond forms that are digitally produced since new media compositions can appear on paper. Her definition of new media focuses on how the author/composer shows awareness, attentiveness, and alertness of how the materiality of her text (her use of sound, image, background, color, layout, etc.) contribute to meaning and reveal the values she embodies as a member of a certain community (15). Here, I’m wondering about the issue of form and content in Wysocki’s definition of new media and how this shift of using “new media,” particularly in the way Wysocki defines it, would affect/ is affecting our concept of the writing process and product and our perception of composing texts. Is there an inclination in Wysocki’s definition to value product over process? How does she define product? Is product for her an ongoing process since whenever I read a text that I have composed, I feel the urge to modify/edit/ revise/ reorganize/ reshape/ reformat my text. I identify strongly with my work, like other writers, because I “own” it (as in it belongs to me). Since texts don’t function independently I feel both protective and vulnerable because I’m aware of how much my personal identity and my membership to different communities are exposed.

In her opening chapter, Wysocki lays out five openings that she sees enacting in her own practices:

1.      The need, in writing about new media in general, for the material thinking of people who teach writing

2.      A need to focus on the specific materiality of the texts we give each other

3.      A need to define “new media texts” in terms of their materialities

4.      A need for production of new media texts in writing classrooms

5.      A need for strategies of generous reading (page 3)

What I find interesting about these five openings is that she embraces the concept of “new media” to accommodate writing rather than digitalize writing to accommodate “new media.” Her approach to “new media” promotes a deeper understanding of the materiality of the texts we produce that “help use hold present what is at stake: to look at texts only through their technological origin is to deflect our attention from what we might achieve mindful that textual practices are always broader than the technological” (19). In other words, Wysocki’s definition of new media encourages an approach that AVOIDS technological determinism and sees “the apparently growing emphasis on the visual in our culture and time” as “a historically situated process” (16). Interestingly enough, Wysocki highlights a theme similar to that echoed in Wesch’s video “Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us”:  

“[Technologies] are in our world and they have weight—but we probably ought not give up our own agency by acting as though technologies come out of nowhere and are autonomous in causing effects” (19).

       

This emphasis on human agency in interacting with technology and molding it to serve our needs rather than acting like passive receivers of technology empowers the composition teacher as an expert who knows how people compose, use, and exchange texts and why they “make these combinations of material.” She then uses her knowledge and expertise to inform new media and extend composition pedagogy toward the visual (19).

               

In contrast to Wysocki’s broad definition of new media, Cynthia Selfe emphasizes the visual elements in her understanding of new media as she believes that new media texts are created in digital environments and that aural and video composition “articulate meanings students struggle to articulate with words” (2-3).  Selfe makes it a point to mention later in this chapter that “the multimodal compositions are not dependent on digital media” (10).  However, she acknowledges the fact that some may accuse her approach of sounding like “technological determinism,” which entails that “our professional work and values should take into account changes and developments in communication technologies” (3). She justifies that by stressing the importance of keeping up with the ways in which students communicate (3). Although I think that Wysocki’s and Selfe’s definitions of “new media” support the new trend of extending our concept of literacy to include a deep understanding of the relationship between form and content, I see Wysocki’s definition more relevant to and more inclusive of non-digital applications and compositions that can be interactive without the integration of technology. 

 

While reading Wysocki’s chapter and before reaching the end of it where she has included a number of creative classrooms activities, I was contemplating how attention to materiality can be taught to students who are very much part of what Wysocki calls “the consumer culture” that “uses visual representations to create unselfconscious and uncritical consuming desires” (16). After reading the activities and noticing the way she lays out this chapter (her use of a variety of font type and size and her experimentation with side notes and page numbers and titles), I now have a better idea of how form and our choices of form indicate the cultural structures and practices that mold us into certain individuals and allude us to believe that we have CHOICES.

 
My favorite classroom activity from 

Wysocki’s chapter is the one in which

students are asked to work on visual 

arguments. This motivated me to

include some visual arguments that 

I found online.

An example of these structures is patriarchy and its value of seriousness, authority, and standardization (Times New Roman, font 12). In other words, we are disciplined to desire and “choose” the very things that we are limited to by these structures. Free will, for example, is a necessary delusion for the existence of patriarchy, which brings me to these questions: Do our students really have choices to compose freely while there are higher structures that entail the implementation of certain criteria for evaluation and assessment? How much can we, Teaching Assistants (given our limited access to resources and our "inferior" status in academia), provide our students with spaces that actually produce people who can identify the social, cultural, and political forms that shape them and provide them with the opportunity and agency to make change without walking into, what Selfe calls, "minefields," whether on the university level or the political level? And does this opportunity/agency translate into a sociopolitical one?

Welcome to My Blog

I’m Lana Oweidat, a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at Ohio University. I’m interested in transnational and postcolonial feminist rhetorics, theories, and pedagogies and how they challenge and broaden our understanding of cultures, identities, texts, ourselves, etc. In addition to working on my PhD, I teach undergraduate writing classes and I’m currently working as an assistant to the Director of Composition.