“Don’t take yourself … too seriously”

Reading the piece by Dickie Selfe and the chapters in Multimodal Composition was eye-opening to me as a composition teacher who would like to integrate the use of technology EFFECTIVELY in my writing classroom. These scholars warn us from taking things to the extreme (too much fun and too much seriousness are no good). In their informative pieces, they call for the critical examination of our uses of technology as many teachers incorporate technology into their writing classroom without giving much thought to the dynamics and practices of their pedagogies. For example, many teachers believe that making multimodal texts available for students’ consumption (showing YouTube videos in class) would mark their classes as technologically advanced. However, for the authors of the chapters we read for today, the real challenge for teachers is to teach students how to analyze, criticize, and compose mediated texts. The passive consumption of multimodal texts DOESN’T make students savvy creators/ producers/viewers/composers of multimodal texts. The real challenge is to help students become critical receivers and composers of mediated texts and to help them understand how technology functions within their culture and in their material lives.  Here, I’m reminded of Wysocki’s emphasis on the importance of understanding one’s materiality and positionality as a writer/composer.

 In chapter 5, “Thinking Rhetorically,” Daniel Keller gives us some hints of how to teach our students to be good rhetoricians who are capable of deploying any number of modes of expression and media to make meaning. As teachers, we’re going to teach them to use all available means to accomplish responsible rhetorical ends. Keller provides us with detailed descriptions/discussions of two multimodal compositions of his students as he points out “how difficult it can be to describe the effects of a multimodal composition … with words alone” (60), and that “each modality does have certain affordances—capabilities of representing meaning in particular ways and in certain contexts” (60). Keller claims that he is not privileging one medium over the other, but he emphasizes that each medium has its own strengths and limitations and that choosing the right medium is a rhetorical choice—a skill that we should teach our students.

What I find interesting is that comp teachers should teach a skill that students had before being standardized and institutionalized as students and citizens by an educational system that over-emphasizes testing and requires following a specific format of writing. Don’t kids use words, drawings, and sounds simultaneously to  express themselves and to reach meaning?

Multimodality, I think, is something innate, organic, and 

“natural.” Our responsibility as teachers is to restore a skill that has 

been suppressed rather than teach/initiate the ability of composing multimodal texts. 

 A long the same lines, in his essay, Dickie Selfe provides us with is a list of reminders of important pedagogical guidelines. Here are my favorites and my responses to them:

"Don’t let the technologies themselves drive your pedagogy"

I can’t agree more with this statement. We’ve read the works of many scholars, such as the Selfes, who emphasize the importance of developing critical technological literacies rather than just incorporating technology into the writing classroom with no apparent pedagogical reason just because we want to be high-tech teachers! Technology enriches our pedagogies rather than replaces/dominates them. We should be able to read and/or evaluate our performances in the classroom. How does the use of technology affect/limit/improve our performance/thinking as writing teachers, and then adapt our use of technology accordingly?       

"Don’t take yourself and your efforts too seriously"

I know that I want to leave room for play/experimentation/clicking on stuff randomly/getting the feel of this new technology, but at the same time, I’m struggling with how this “license to play” would challenge my confidence and authority as a teacher. 

I don’t use confidence and authority in the traditional way. Perhaps I’m thinking of ethos here.

“All uses of technology in the classroom are experimental”

It is reassuring to think of using technology in the classroom as experimental because rather than feeling “ashamed” that I don’t know the answer to a technological question or that I don’t know how to use an application, I become more driven to know and even ask the high-tech students in the class to teach me. I think it is here that the collaborative spirit manifests itself in the classroom.