My Website

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Site Map of Final Project

I will host this website on a sub domain of a website.

Home Page:

Using Flash, I will include seven floating icons (the point of having floating icons is to achieve a nonlinear presentation of these elements); each will take the viewer to a different page that represents an element of this website.

About this Website:

This page will include (1) the rationale behind designing this website, (2) information about me, (3) and instructions on how to use this website. Here is what these sections might say:

(1) The rationale behind it: 

I have designed this web site to function as a primary source for my 306J (Women and Writing) students. The theme of this course is focused on how acknowledging and historicizing difference and otherness contribute to our students’ literacies and their ongoing negotiations of their identities. The website experience provides a space for them to engage in this process.

For this website, I have collected images, stories, interviews, and descriptions of cultural practices that involve women across cultures and  have contextualized these materials in their historical contexts. I view this web site as an assemblage of different modes and forms—a space that is inclusive of difference in both content and form. My goal is to use associations and relations of different visual and alphabetical elements to create a coherent whole that tells stories of difference and help students position themselves in this conversation while resisting a linear patriarchal structure that highly values logos in both content and form; this can be noticed from the design of the website where all icons are floating in a nonlinear space. This is a dialogical space in which the power structure is horizontal rather than hierarchical—a space where identities are negotiated and renegotiated with the “Other” on equal grounds.

(2) About me:

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 Assistant to the Director of Composition.

(3) How to use this web site:

This section will provide a detailed description of how users of this web site can navigate it efficiently. I will include an icon that takes the viewer back to the home page. 

Activities:

I will create in-class activities that speak to the theme of the course. These activities will be uploaded as word documents or as PDFs. They might include images or videos for illustrative purposes, or they might ask students to compose a mini project that includes visual components.

I will include an icon that takes the viewer back to the home page.

 

Assignments:

This page will include the assignment that I worked on for this class. Perhaps I will create new assignments, or adapt ones that have been used by other writing instructors. An icon will take the viewer back to the home page.

Stories of Difference:

This section is the kernel of this website since it will provide students with different materials (interviews, YouTube videos, poems, images, music, etc.) that will expose them to experiences that differ from the norm. I will start this page with a brief introduction that gives an overview of the stories that I want to include here.

Using Flash, there will be three icons; each will represent a cultural practice: (Chinese foot binding?), (the veil?), and (honor crimes?). Each of these icons will take the viewer to a different page dedicated to one of the cultural phenomenon mentioned above. On this page, I will include an icon that takes the viewer back to the home page.

On the page of each cultural phenomenon, I will include an image of a woman representing that culture in addition to different cultural representations (poems, interviews, descriptions of the cultural practice). Also, I’m thinking of including an audio of the popular cultural music from the area (this all depends on the availability of these items for public use). Since I have less than half a month to finish this project and since I’m envisioning this as an ongoing project, I will work on three of these cultural practices for now and include more later. 

In order to immerse the student in a particular culture, I will try my best to let the “Other women” speak for themselves and include conversations in different languages to envelope them in that culture and then the student gets the experience of being the “Other.”

Theory, Pedagogy, and Praxis:

Since I envision this web site as the outcome of the marriage between the theory and pedagogy of transnational feminism and that of multimodal composition studies, I want to include an alphabetical literature review of the main theories that create the foundation for my project. Therefore, from transnational feminist theory and pedagogy, I will incorporate the work of the following scholars: Chandra Mohanty, Uma Narayan, Lila Abu-Lughod, Katarzyne Marciniak, Mary Queen, etc. As for multimodal composition studies, I will include articles that tackle themes of transnationalism, globalization, the linkage between technology and literacy, evaluating the uses of technology with a critical eye, etc. (C. Selfe and Wysocki touch upon some of those themes). This literature review will also emphasize the importance of being aware of the politics of representation and of reflectivity.  I will include an icon that takes the viewer back to the home page.

Materials:

On this page, I will include the alphabetical texts that I require for this class. I will upload articles and links to books that my students will read for this class. I will include an icon that takes the viewer back to the home page.

I know that I’m being overly ambitious with this project, but because I think of it as an ongoing project I will complete as much of it as I can in the limited time frame.