Megan Gianfagna's blog

Student PUBLIC-ation

Megan Gianfagna — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:55:10 +0000

Author:

Megan Gianfagna

Image Credit:

Vitaminsea

I’m teaching RHE 309K - Rhetoric of Going Viral this year, a course dedicated to the study and design of digital texts in the public realm. The final project asks students to create a digital text designed to participate in a particular online conversation and publish it in an appropriate venue. Last semester, I had a student with the digital composition skills to create any number of smart and engaging final projects. Instead he opted to write a product review and post it to an online retail site. The review was thoughtful and tailored well to the rhetorical situation. But the reasons he gave for not creating a video or visual meme—that this was the only opinion and format he felt comfortable making public—has had me thinking about what I’m really asking of my students when I require them to send their projects into public digital spaces.

This semester I noticed an opposite but equally thought-provoking behavior among my students. I gave them the option of using Storify to create and publish their first essay for the course, a platform I used last semester to help them outline their Mapping a Meme essays. It struck me that every student that used Storify set up a profile that included a username close to their full legal names and uploaded a picture to their account. When I opened their stories, the first any of them had every created with the platform, I was greeted with glimpses into some very “personal” moments captured in the profile images.

The Storify platform made for such successful essays that I’m considering making it a mandatory composing and publishing platform in the future. However, I’m wondering if the amount of discussion around privacy issues and ethos I already have built into the course is sufficient. In addition to examining students’ ethos in online venues like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, I try to demonstrate for them the lasting imprint the texts they post have on the all-knowing Internet—how they can’t necessarily take back the things they post, even the most personal images. After all, publishing online demands that they understand what they can control and what rights they are giving up in the digital space. I find Chris Clark’s blog post “Taking Steps to Respect Student Privacy in Public Work” useful in meeting this goal, as he outlines some key strategies that students can use to address privacy concerns.

I do believe that having students publish work online provides an excellent opportunity to discuss privacy and connect those discussions to their personal online activities in immediate ways. Through my editorial work with The Journal for Undergraduate Multimedia Projects (TheJUMP), I am lucky to read other instructors’ multimedia assignment descriptions regularly and see the work their students produce, and often publish online, in response to the prompt. These kinds of assignments can work beautifully, particularly when they are accompanied by rationale for rhetorical choices and reflections on the production process. If I’m going to continue to require my students to participate in public, online conversations through their coursework, I need to give them more robust opportunities to reflect on and react to what that means for them both personally and professionally.

The truth is that I don’t want to give up these kinds of assignments. If anything, I’m working to make them a more integral part of my courses. I think that teaching rhetoric through the lens of civic and cultural engagement is valuable if not unavoidable, and digital composition offers some exciting ways of engaging students and helping them develop twenty-first century literacies. Having students write to a “real” rhetorical situation is a common pedagogical practice based on the belief that it helps students see the implications of their work on an audience outside the classroom and helps them see how they can apply their analytical and writing skills more broadly. But requiring digital publication is arguably different than having students send a letter to their Congressperson or write a letter to the editor for a local paper. The Internet keeps a record that we can’t necessarily edit later, though there are ways to make ourselves more or less visible. I don’t know that most students get a chance to discuss these issues in their other courses, and in that way rhetoric and writing courses can fill a unique and necessary role. As Google and others implement new privacy polices, I hope the conversation around student privacy will continue to evolve. Staying up to date on these changes can be challenging, but keeping a dialogue going among educators and having open discussions with our students about the implications of the assignments we’re designing are important steps.

The Many Upsides of the Student Conference

Megan Gianfagna — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:37:42 +0000

Author:

Megan Gianfagna

Image Credit:

via Winter Love

Even for a small class, student conferences take a lot of time and energy. I often hold conferences to discuss a plan for revision of their essays. That means that 6 hours of conferences (15 minutes each x 23 students) usually follow long nights spent grading the essays that are the basis of our discussion. I’ve often left the campus coffee shop after I’ve met with half the class in and felt like I’ve been stuck on repeat—drained from keeping my enthusiasm up during so many different versions of the same basic conversation.

So if the conference process means extra time, extra logistics, and extra pressure to meet tight grading deadlines, why do I continue to do it, semester after semester? It’s not because every student turns out a comprehensive and polished revision of his/her essay as a result of our short meetings. It’s because those brief but focused sessions give me a chance to hear my students talk about their writing process and their experience with the project. For me, it gives the essay a backstory and helps me understand the thought processes behind some of their decisions. It builds a relationship that makes them more comfortable in the classroom and more invested in the work. I also think it makes them more likely to come to office hours or to visit the Undergraduate Writing Center about subsequent assignments. For students accustomed to professors in large lectures knowing them by EID rather than first name, seeing that the instructor is willing to invest the time in their work makes a big difference, at least to some.

I make the first conference of the semester mandatory and all subsequent conferences optional. Because I use the Learning Record as the evaluative framework, student effort and reflection on that effort gets captured and considered in the final grade for the course. As a result, I find that most students sign up for subsequent conference meetings of their own volition. In my current class, Rhetoric of Going Viral, I have mostly sophomores, juniors and seniors. With this group, I’m finding conferences especially productive and energizing. Because we use memes as the objects of our rhetorical inquiry, I get to learn a lot about my students’ personal interests and relationship with online information.

Though the primary purpose of the conference is talk through my comments on their essays and address any questions, I try to talk about something else first. For instance, I like to being by commenting on something I found interesting about a blog post or asking a question about something I noticed in one of their Learning Record observations. This signals to students that I’m there to engage them in conversation and not talk at them about the paper. I’ve found that students use the one-on-one opportunity to ask about how they might apply what they’re learning in class to the kind of writing they do in their majors, to ask about other assignments or class policies, or to tell me how they think I’m strange for letting them interrogate popular texts instead of writing research papers with scholarly sources. I’ll take it. Watching them think about writing in a more expansive way is, for me at least, one of many fulfilling conference benefits.

Even though I build these conferences into the course schedule in addition to peer review and revision workshops, revision can often be an afterthought for students. To help them leave the conference with a concrete plan of action, I like to have them do a brief activity ahead of time. I find it can really help focus our discussion. Some that I’ve used in the past include asking them to rank my comments in what they perceive as the order of importance or having them choose the top three things they think they should focus on in their revision and explain why. I’ve also asked them to write a brief outline of what they would do to the essay if they had more time (to be completed before I send them my comments).

Though not all students are always prepared and some seem like they are ready to basically sprint out the door the second we’ve finished our conversation, I’ve yet to feel like the process wasn’t worth it. I do wonder, though, if other instructors have a very different view of conferences or use more creative strategies to maximize the experience for both teacher and student. I wonder too what will happen when I have to teach more courses in a semester and have to adjust my approach. Individual conferences may not always feasible, so I think I’ll just enjoy the luxury while I have it.

Inventing with Images

Megan Gianfagna — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:20:26 +0000

Author:

Megan Gianfagna

Image Credit:

Will Bailey

I’ve often had students work with images in past semesters, but in those activities I’ve used them as texts for analysis or tools for organization, as when students constructed visual-verbal-aural outlines in Animoto to help them prepare for their formal essays. This semester I decided to have my RHE 306 class focus on using images to aid in invention and construction of a succinct argument. Specifically, I asked them to create a bumper sticker through an in-class activity meant to help them explore commonplaces and introduce them to visual rhetoric. As I note in my lesson plan, students created their bumper stickers, along with a short reflection, in one class period.

Because the activity acted as a bridge into our rhetorical analysis unit, I wanted it to call their attention to basic design decisions like placement, size, color and typeface as well as the rhetorical impact of these elements. Most importantly, I wanted them to focus on how they were responding to or incorporating a particular commonplace in their bumper sticker and crafting a message to accompany the image. To accomplish these goals, I suggested they use PowerPoint or even Word unless they had past experience with more sophisticated image-manipulation software. I found they were familiar with importing images into PowerPoint from making presentations in the past, and that when they had questions about what to do or how to do it, they were able to collaborate with those around them to arrive at a solution.

Using familiar technology in a low-stakes assignment made them feel more comfortable as they were building confidence in their capacity for visual and verbal invention and composition. Though they were uncomfortable at first with what they perceived as a more creative exercise than they’d encountered in most other writing courses, they were able to write copy that employed a variety of very effective rhetorical strategies and convey their ideas in a genre-appropriate way. I was particularly impressed at how they were able to use each other as resources for brainstorming and thinking through how their bumper stickers might be read differently if actually applied to a car.

I believe the added value of this assignment was in how students used familiar software in an unfamiliar way. It pushed them to think about the program’s capabilities and not just the particular rhetorical situations and genres it has become closely associated with. As Stuart Selber says in Multiliteracies for a Digital Age, one marker of students’ functional literacy is “mak[ing] use of the specialized discourses associated with computers” (45), a goal that instructors can help them reach by encouraging them to “appropriate the various discourses of literary technologies” (58). As much as I enjoy showing students the possibilities offered by newer, shinier programs, I found that helping them see alternative uses and greater composing potential in a familiar platform was simple and rewarding.