FoolsCap

Somewhere, Rowan and Martin are spinning in their respective graves.

Assuming, of course, that they’re dead.

Some general thoughts and also some on Writing New Media:

• General

Something that occurred to me whilst starting the book.  It sort of picks up recent themes that I’ve been writing about, so regular readers might be interested in skipping down a few paragraphs. 

What new media seem to offer (at best anyway) to comp teachers, is a shift from approaching writing as solely (largely at least) hermeneutic to a writing that is primarily (largely at least) heuristic.  The constraints of print media (limited circulation, linearity, geocultural [Assuming anyone knows what I mean by that.  I sure don’t.] isolation) can be seen as limiting to some degree the potential of writing.  New media functions (infinte circulation, networked structures, global accessibility)  encourage not only hermeneutic but also heuristic functions of writing by focusing on the virtues of connectivity and explicit intertextuality (as opposed to a print media intertext that can be seen as a byproduct of writing rather than its intent). 

I keep returning to this question of the dep’t’s institutional value.  Why?  Well, it seems it seems to me that much of the direction of the courses we’ll be teaching is out of our hands, determined by the university and dep’t expectations, goals, and aims for the basic comp requirement–which is obviously connected to our current decisions in constructing syllabi that balance our interests as pedagogues and scholars against/in accordance with the institutional demands that we have little control over.  So the question for us–or at least me–now is this:  Does my interest in trying to encourage "cool" writing (or at least something derived from it) coincide with institutional expectations?  To pose the question differently:  How do you reconcile your pedagogy with your place in a dep’t/university that might not share your pedagogical aims?

Which is to ask, further, whether my students (or any of our students) will "professionally" benefit from doing an imagetext poem assignment (and I was happy to see pp65/6 where Wysocki steals my assignment idea wholesale) or a similar new media/technology oriented assignment?  I’m not necessarily focused on the practical side of it; that is, students unfamiliar with PowerPoint will learn a little of it in doing the project, so it has a practical value to be sure.  But what is the specific pedagogical aim behind such projects?  I can say: it asks students to recognize that many of us think intertextually (visualizing images while reading a poem), so we should learn to compose intertextually as well (in whatever form that intertext takes).  But I’m sort of dissatisfied by that answer in that it doesn’t seem specifically connected to a larger pedagogical project such as Berlin’s  insistence on a democratically involved student.  I recognize that perhaps noone expects a first-semester apprentice teacher to have such aims; nevertheless, I don’t think it’s too early to start raising the question.

All of this points to a larger question, one I don’t have an immediate answer for.  I’ve been reading the exchanges on the listserv about the pedagogical value of popcycles/mystories and its brought me to this question: Does/Should the aim of one’s pedagogy focus on the process or the product?  The mystory/imagetext/new media approaches are great for encouraging critical thought and asking students to make connections where they might not otherwise, but they don’t have–or at least, I don’t see–the practical value of them, in that few employers, I imagine, will commission such work from our students.  But the thought of teaching the tired old forms of writing (argumentative, descriptive, narrative etc.) seems sort of dull–so I recognize that for my sake (and my students) I want to incorporate some of the "new" approaches we’ve discussed.  The two sorts of assignment, as I suggest, seem to generate from different pedagogical stances: one that argues we should train students to think a certain way in order to produce a certain sort of critical faculty, a focus more on the process of thought that generates writing (and can be reflected in writing too); the other stance rather trains students in the expectations of certain standard generic forms, a focus on the practical use of the products that writing can generate (and here I don’t necessarily mean the sot of civic-engagement assignments mentioned in Trimbur).  So: process or product?

And to be clear, by saying "process" I don’t mean specifically expressivism or social-model schools of thought.  They might fall into my two (oversimplified) models, but not really what I was addressing.

• Specific

I’m more drawn to Wysocki’s model of new media (as a sort of text that calls attention to its construction and materiality) than to Selfe’s digitally-oriented model.  Both obviously have their uses, but since I’m still building a familiarity with digital comp (other than Word), I think Wysocki’s has more to offer me as pedagogue, student, and scholar.

It turns out I don’t actually have much to say about the book so far, or what I do have to say is incorporated elsewhere in the post.  I’m trying to find ways to use some the assignments presented here for my purposes, but I won’t bore all y’all with the gory details.

On a somewhat related note. . .Coming from the UGS committee meeting.  Apparently our beloved university has instituted a requirement for every departmental major to incorporate a "Level Two" computer literacy element into their major program.  Now, the specific standards of level two literacy were not made explicit; the UGS committee is debating ways into incorporating this newly handed down requirement into our program.  I wonder, though, if one way this could be met is through a new media course for majors?  On one hand, this could be a great way for those of us interested in newmed to teach something that the discipline as a whole is still grappling with–a possible way to make our own CV a little more enticing to prospective employers.  On the other hand. . .is there not a danger in saying, as comp instructors, that here’s a new media course and here’s a comp course and never the twain shall meet?  Much discussion has centered around specifically why we should incorporate newmed theory and practice into our comp pedagogies; and I’d certainly hate to make the distinction above to the detriment of freshman comp.  But, having been a major here at Wayne myself, I don’t know where else the L2 requirement would fall.  The senior seminar would have to been specifically oriented to newmed I think to fulfill it–and I don’t know if a Web document (for example) would fulfill the writing intensive goal of the seminar either.

What we have then seems to be an ideological conflict.  On one hand, WSU (and our dep’t specifically) is placing a value on a certain level of digital literacy and practice–all well and good.  On the other, the larger academic community is still largely tied to concerns of print media–think here of the differing (or deferring, hahaha) "prestige" accorded to a print journal vs. an online journal.  Much of our dep’t’s curriculum, as mentioned, seems too to reinforce the primacy of print media as a discursive institution, while more courses are developed and theories incorporated that point toward a greater emphasis on newmed practices.

So, basically, we’re screwed.