Blogging Pedagogy - multimedia

Discussing Stereotypes in the Classroom

Sarah A. Riddick — Thu, 26 Feb 2015 22:38:50 +0000

Author:

Sarah Riddick

Image Credit:

Ookami-Schiffer. "Don't Stereotype Me!" Deviant Art, n.d. Web. 14 Nov 2014. <http://ookami-schiffer.deviantart.com/art/Don-t-Stereotype-Me-321935197>.

One of my primary aims in a rhetoric classroom is to equip students with the skills to thoughtfully respond to the world around them. What that means, as fellow instructors know well, is that sometimes it is appropriate to discuss rhetorical arguments that make the audience uncomfortable—a discomfort that could potentially halt or hinder discussion in the classroom. Moreover, given that every person in a classroom brings with them a distinct set of past experiences, influences, and perspectives, certain arguments and texts can affect some students more personally than others.

As an instructor, I make a conscious effort to establish upfront a classroom ethos that is founded on respect. We respect each other’s viewpoints, as well as those featured in our discussions, and I encourage my students to maintain this respect throughout the semester. Of course, despite the classroom being a “safe space” for reflection and discussion, it can nevertheless be intimidating for a student to vocalize what they notice in a text, especially when they view the text as stating something offensive. One moment in a recent class discussion of mine illustrated this point wonderfully, albeit unexpectedly.

Having defined some key rhetorical topics (induction, causation, correlation, definition, analogy, and difference), I asked my students to assess a variety of texts that feature these strategies. Samples included two-to-three straightforward sentences, an excerpt from an argumentative article about a recently controversial issue, a series of photographs, and a few excerpts from television and film. One excerpt came from the final court scene of Legally Blonde, a well-known film that continues to circulate regularly in popular culture. Specifically, I chose the moment in which Reese Witherspoon’s character Elle Woods realizes that a male witness in the trial could not have been involved with the female accused, despite his testimony that he had been. Elle comes to this conclusion after the witness, Enrique, identifies her shoes by their designer. After watching the one-minute clip, one of my students eagerly began to speak about which of the topics she observed, but she quickly and nervously prefaced her response with a clarification that she herself did not support what she was about to say.

This is precisely why I chose this clip. This moment at the water fountain is, in my opinion, the film’s defining moment. Elle’s eyes widen, and she runs into the courtroom to inform her team about what she is now completely certain: Enrique is gay. Her argument is, approximately: “Enrique knows designers. Gay men know designers. Therefore, Enrique is gay.” According to my students, Elle draws a correlation between Enrique’s sexual orientation and his knowledge of fashion designers based on a stereotype about gay men. Rather than challenge her argument, the accused agrees with her, adding another stereotype to the mix (Enrique listens to Cher). Thus, Elle, who has been struggleing to succeed throughout the entire film until now, takes over the defense and wins the case.

Legally Blonde came out in 2001. Many might say it was a career-defining moment for Witherspoon, and the film was so successful that it has a sequel and a Broadway adaptation. That said, nearly a decade and a half later, my classroom full of young undergraduates watched this one-minute clip and uneasily recognized the rhetorical power of a moment that until now had likely provoked no more than a chuckle. As my students agreed, the basis of Elle’s argument in this scene—an argument that catapults her to victory in the movie—is both flimsy and based on a stereotype.

For me, this was a wonderful teaching moment. Not only did my students recognize a rhetorical topic at-work, but they also demonstrated an understanding of how far-reaching, significant, and even insidious argumentation strategies may be. To put the aforementioned student at ease, I took a moment to commend her on being conscientious enough to distinguish herself from an offensive argument, and I reminded the class as a whole that in our classroom it is okay for us to talk about what we observe in texts without claiming personal responsibility for them. In fact, that is one of the most important reasons for taking this course: to learn how to respond thoughtfully to others while establishing and maintaining one’s own position.

Making the Most of Digital Tools in a Class on Black Public Intellectuals

Regina Mills — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 13:01:10 +0000

Author:

Regina Mills

Image Credit:

The Atlantic

I am teaching a literature course next term (African American Literature and Culture). Thankfully, when I teach in the fall, I will be in the Digital Research and Writing Lab (DWRL). However, unlike a research-based writing class, literature classes do not seem as easily tailored towards the digital tools we have available. Thus, I’d like to take this blog post as an opportunity to throw out some of the ideas I have for class projects and activities.

First, the tiniest bit of background. My syllabus is a work in progress but currently revolves around the theme, “Black Public Intellectuals.” I was inspired by the current debates over the need for more public intellectuals (written mostly by older white men) and whether or not Melissa Harris-Perry (lovingly known as MHP) is a public intellectual (as claimed by Ta-Nehisi Coates in this Atlantic article). I plan on reading intellectuals from Frederick Douglass, WEB Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Cornel West, and of course MHP. Some of the questions I’ll be posing are: What is the role of the public intellectual? Is the role of the Black public intellectual different in any way? In what ways have Black public intellectuals broadcast their ideas in the past? In the present? Who are the Black public intellectuals of our times?

With this in mind, I want to discuss some of the activities/prompts I’m considering for this class. First, I’m thinking that I am so tired of having to answer questions about things on my syllabus and resources (that are underused!). I have tried syllabus quizzes, refusing to answer E-mails about questions I’ve already answered, etc. but I want to try something new. So, here’s my idea: A scavenger hunt of class policies from the syllabus and key resources/locations. I’m considering requiring students to visit the DWRL Open Lab, the Undergraduate Writing Center (UWC), and the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, plus certain helpful websites. I would need to ask if the UWC, the Open Lab, and the Warfield Center could help me out. Maybe they could have business cards or some proof of being there as part of the Scavenger Hunt completion. This could be done on the first day of class as the major activity for the day, with a debrief at the end of class.

As for writing projects, I’m considering having students create a website on a Black public intellectual we did or did not study in class. Since I intend to give only one or two readings per intellectual, this makes it so students can go deeper into a public intellectual that intrigued them in class or they can research others that might speak more to their own social justice and/or intellectual pursuits. I would imagine this website having to include: close readings of a few texts, historical context and biography of the Black public intellectual, and a list of recommended readings (with short annotated bibs/previews of what the sites/resources offer). I could make this an end-of-the-semester project (though it really does ask a lot), but I could also see it being done in piecemeal with certain sections being done over the course of the semester. Or having students have bi-weekly blog posts where they work on drafts, track progress, etc. My one concern is that I don’t know the kind of blogging websites that would be less clunky than Blackboard or Canvas (our current management software).

So these are some of my thoughts – I would really appreciate your feedback and other suggestions for class activities revolving around the themes and questions I have set up. Please leave a comment or E-mail me at regina.mills@utexas.edu.

Reading Like a Detective

Hala Herbly — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 04:17:33 +0000

Author:

Hala Herbly

Image Credit:

British Broadcasting Corporation

Close reading is a cornerstone of literature classes, but it can be a drag to teach. The excitement I sometimes feel about finding new and contradictory meanings for words a little difficult to translate to the average non-major (and even the average major). So this semester I decided to frame my close reading lesson in terms of detective work. Specifically, I decided to show them about fifteen minutes' worth an episode of the BBC drama Sherlock.

umbrella_slideshow_01.jpg

Here's my reasoning. Sherlock is a rather eccentric "private consultant" with an uncanny ability to interpret crime scenes. He is able to do this through his well-honed powers of observation, which allow him to infer a shocking amount of information about people, places, and things. For example, upon his first meeting with his partner Dr. Watson, Sherlock is immediately able to tell that Watson is an Iraq war veteran who suffers from PTSD and has an estranged sibling. This close attention to detail makes Sherlock interesting to us, but intolerable to those around him (and this of course is the pleasure of watching the show).

Like detective work, close reading requires a sharp attention to detail. The opening lines and stage directions of a play like Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, for example, tell us almost everything we need to know about the main character. But it is a skill to be able to infer this much from just a few details. For one thing, it takes a lot of patience with the text. It also, as I mentioned above, requires the ability to focus in on details that might appear to be insignificant. And finally, it involves a kind of confidence--confidence in the text to be able to produce meaning that goes "deeper" than initally apparent, and confidence in one's own reading ability and "sense" of the text. Though I would have hated to hear this myself in my late teens and early twenties, I always tell my class to follow their intuition or "hunches" about the text. Without the willingness to take this kind of interpretive risk, you end up with the dreaded "um, I think we might be reading too much into this." I try to discourage that kind of thinking by telling my class that any kind of interpretation, no matter how wild, is valid as long as they can back it up convincingly with evidence.

I guess, then, that I try to teach my class to assume a particular kind of attitude toward the text. While I am always careful to lay out the historical context of any work that we're reading, I also think it's important to encourage them to "read into" the text. This demonstrates to them that meaning is something that they can learn how to create, rather than something they've simply inherited from the critics and readers before them.

Multimodal Writing: How Do We Assess New Media?

Rachel Mazique — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 00:35:39 +0000

Author:

Rachel Mazique

Image Credit:

"Multimedia Message" by rockcreek on Flickr

"Students should be able to both read critically and write functionally, no matter what the medium" (William Kist).

Last semester, I gave a presentation to a class of new Rhetoric and Writing instructors on my "Disability in Pop Culture" class proposal, experiences, and syllabus. Professor Mark Longaker introduced my class as one that works with disability and new media. Although I hadn’t thought of it that way, I realized that my pedagogy most definitely incorporates not only disability theory but also “new” media: whether within my lesson plans and clips pertaining to rhetoric/disability, in the design of my course—with our PbWorks wiki platform, or with the final major assignment I had students write: a multimodal argument. I was apprehensive about assigning this type of new media writing project, but, fortunately, resources abound. This blog post offers some of those resources I drew from and shares my method for assessing my students’ projects.

I have been working with The Journal of Undergraduate Multimedia Projects for over two years now, in a variety of positions, and this work served as my primary resource. The website includes information on the students’ project assignments and on the course. Professors often share their class websites, which means that this journal becomes a pedagogical resource as well as a publication venue. Professor Tanya Rodrigue’s class website inspired me to create a YouTube channel for my own class—even though my multimodal assignment prompt did not restrict the shape of the project to videos (as you can see from the links on the left of our homepage). From Rodrigue's class Tumblr, I came across a helpful article, “Between Modes: Assessing Student New Media Compositions.” I also drew on assignment descriptions and prompts from Professor Justin Hodgson and Scott Nelson.

The National Council of Teachers of English has a “Position Statement on Multimodal Literacies” including statements such as Kist’s, which begins this blog post. Another quote that I took to heart and found exemplified in a TED talk by a 12-year-old was:

"In digital forms, students, even very young students, are often more literate in the technical aspects of digital production than many of their teachers. Many students are frequently exposed to popular technologies, have the leisure time to experiment with their own production, develop the social connections that encourage peer teaching and learning, and may have access to more advanced technology than is available at school. The 'definitions' of multi-modal composing may be written by educators, but they will most likely have first been pioneered by these young people."

Hence, I strongly encouraged my students to collaborate on these projects, to learn from each other, and I happily learned from them. Working in the Digital Writing and Research Labs also means that I had our Visual Media Specialist, Scott Nelson, for support. He came to one of my classes and led an iMovie workshop; he also addressed copyright flags and takedowns on YouTube. Thanks to all of these resources, I felt much more confident about assigning this multimodal project; I also planned for three weeks of class time so students could work together. This time helped alleviate the concerns of the “low-tech” students who were anxious about this project. All of my students proved to have a tech-savviness that they (in some cases) did not know they had. Most were excited about writing in multiple modes. In short, they all relied upon/developed their digital literacy skills.

Teaching and assessing student work via The Learning Record portfolio system (which I explain more in-depth in previous blogs and lesson plans) allows me to assess work not solely based on the final technological project, but on how well it meets the requirements of the assignment, shows development and research into writing in new digital modes, and effectively presents an argument.

After the revision stage, I commented on student progress by synthesizing the comments of three of their peers on how persuasive the project was and whether the revisions following peer review were substantial. The instructions were as follows:

If you have reviewed this project during peer review, answer both questions below.

If this is your first time viewing the project, only answer the second question.

1. Did your peer substantially revise the project? Or, did your peer attend to your feedback and improve the overall project? What improvements stood out and were effective? What still needs improvement?

2. Were you persuaded by the argument? Describe how the argument persuaded you to think or feel a certain way. Or, does it successfully convince you to do something? How did the elements of rhetoric (logos, ethos, and pathos) work to persuade you? Or, how did a lack of attention to certain rhetorical elements (logos, ethos, and/or pathos) result in an unconvincing argument?

This method proved effective because it allowed me to see common threads in feedback and to elaborate on points where students left off. Following the advice of Madeleine Sorapure in “Between Modes: Assessing Student New Media Compositions,” I evaluated projects not only on how well they met the requirements of the assignment, but also on how well they created rhetorical impact via “productive tension” between modes (from the visual, to the textual, to the auditory). In sum, my evaluations via the Learning Record grading system strove to avoid imposing a method of assessment from print essays and, rather, to connect evaluation to “everything else in the course, from the assignments themselves to the readings, the class activities, and the software we use” (Sorapure 2). In my classes, the course goals for development in research, the writing process, presentation, argumentation, and digital literacy all came together in this final project--allowing students to display their skills and to work through the essential learning dimension of confidence and independence.

Why Teach Popular Culture?

Laura Thain — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 03:13:09 +0000

Author:

Laura Thain

Image Credit:

Wikimedia Commons

This semester, I have taken great pleasure in teaching The Rhetoric of Celebrity to a group of enthusiastic and talented students. In my office hours a few weeks ago, a student who came in to discuss a recent assignment with me began our conversation by asking if “all rhetoric teachers had to be so young.”

“Well,” I answered, “most of us are graduate students, so we don’t have our PhDs yet. We’re generally in our twenties and thirties.”

“So, what do you want to do, you know, professionally? Do you want to work for TMZ someday?” she asked. I smiled a little and explained that I was a doctoral student studying 18^th century intellectual history and the English novel. She looked perplexed. “Why are you teaching us about music and movie stars and stuff then? Were there stars back then? What does what you teach have to do with being a professor?”

It’s a provocative question. Many of us shy away from studying our “pet” interests in the mass media to make ourselves more marketable—out of fear of entering an oversaturated market of scholars of popular culture. I’ve also heard many of my colleagues voice concerns over ruining what they love by studying it: “I just want to read/listen to/view __________ and enjoy it without thinking about how I can interrogate it!” is a common reprise in graduate offices. But I don’t think we really mean this. In fact, on our Facebook walls, in our informal discussions, and in our lesson plans we examine and analyze the media objects we encounter constantly. We express excitement when we find a particularly glowing example of a rhetorical principle in the most recent broadcast of SNL or The Daily Show. We talk about the ethics of ironic distance in The Colbert Report and Lena Dunham’s Girls. We laugh at memes that mix Derrida with Honey Boo Boo; we eagerly await the season openers of Breaking Bad and Homeland. I even have a fairly well-rehearsed defense of Britney Spears in terms of Barthes’ Mythologies.

At the heart of the importance of cultural studies in general, and popular culture in particular, is the interrogation of the evaluative mode of rhetorical discourse. The controversy model upon which all of our introductory composition courses here in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing are based emphasize three main modes of discourse: the descriptive mode, the analytical mode, and the evaluative mode. These modes represent a cumulative skill set—that is, that one cannot analyze before one can describe, and one cannot evaluate before one can analyze. Within this model, evaluation usually takes place in terms of a position paper on a social issue. For instance, last years’ first year forum book encouraged RHE 306 students to argue for a particular position on school reform; this year, the first year forum topic is oriented toward digital democracy and Web 2.0.

This unit structure transfer neatly into classes that deal directly with public policy—the Rhetoric of Protest, the Rhetoric of Gentrification, or the Rhetoric of Disasters—because the evaluative unit of these course topics easily fits into an argument for policy change. But how do we teach evaluative rhetorics in less civic-minded classes? How do we teach students how to evaluate a music video, a documentary film, or a comedy routine?

Teaching popular culture can be a crucial tool in teaching students how to make the evaluative turn when examining implicit, rather than explicit, styles of argumentation. Because students are often already familiar with the content, they are able to draw on a vast array of cultural associations when formulating their own series of ethical or aesthetic criteria, which is a crucial precondition for adept rhetorical evaluation. It is what keeps students and scholars alike from falling back on response-type criticism alone and seeing larger systems of meaning in media objects. It is what elevates the rhetoric classroom from book club to site of social critique. I believe the most important objective of teaching the evaluative turn in rhetorical theory—as it is in the descriptive and analytical units, as well—is to emphasize the utterly essential concern of audience. In order to do this, we must teach students to think beyond their own personal responses and consider how different rhetorics appeal to others. This process always begins with students learning to recognize these processes within themselves, but they must move beyond this in order to understand the effects of rhetoric in society at large.

The flaw of “book-club” style reader-response is that it is utterly centered on the individual and encourages us to read complex implementations of standard cultural mythic structures for plot, and the actions of the characters within these cultural media objects as somehow changeable. This elicits responses from students such as “If Britney hadn’t driven around LA during the summer of 2007 looking for attention…” or “If Mookie hadn’t vandalized the pizza shop in the end of Do the Right Thing…” in the same way that a reader might muse on the fate of Heathcliff had he not left Wuthering Heights to find his fame and fortune. This sort of response to popular culture undermines the ability of readers to discern that the choices the characters before them make, whether real or fictional, are nonetheless mediated by cultural forces as a precondition for audiences to even understand that a choice was made. In other words, the action and the depiction of the action are the argument; we cannot separate them from each other. Learning to make the evaluative turn rhetorically in popular culture means understanding that we judge the acts of groups or individuals as they are mediated through implicit media arguments; that is, we must teach students to examine with scrutiny the carrier of the message as much as the message itself, because one cannot exist outside of the other. In this exercise, the use of digitally-equipped classrooms is an invaluable tool, because the discussion of the dissemination of cultural myths in media objects is not only technologically possible but environmentally fostered.

Teaching popular culture means teaching students how to read and understand the content and power of implicit arguments as mediated by mass culture. It means deferring knee-jerk evaluative judgments—ones without distinct sets of ethical criteria. It means recognizing and resisting assumptions about the distinctions between high and low culture, and understanding mass media as, at least in some sense, a reflection of, rather than the cause of, cultural attitudes and mores. Close rhetorical analysis of objects in popular culture deconstruct the myths of societal devolution and help us to understand ourselves in our own moment without perspective and without hindsight—all things that make us better readers, better viewers, and, perhaps ultimately, better citizens.

Truthiness and Consequences: Balancing the Content-Driven Rhetoric Classroom

Aaron Mercier — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 17:07:37 +0000

Author:

Aaron Mercier

Image Credit:

Photo by Webrageous, Captions by Aaron Mercier

When I decided to make my rhetoric and writing course about “truthiness” as Stephen Colbert defines it—something that “feels true,” without needing to rely on pesky facts—I thought I knew what I wanted to do with it. I wanted to be in a networked computer classroom, to break down the barriers between the classroom and the homework. I wanted a course blog so students could practice writing in a variety of modes, and have the chance to see what their classmates were doing and thinking, and to establish more connections between classroom and individual learning.

I wanted the course readings to be timely, to be engaged with the issues of the week, so students would start to develop a sense of urgency around the skills I was teaching. I wanted to focus heavily on research and reading skills, and use the resources of the university and the web at large in conversational real time. No more blank silences when I ask a question, I wanted to hear the gentle rattle-and-click of focused research being carried out on all those fancy computers; I wanted to harry my students into developing a habitual curiosity as a result of unfamiliarity.

And it’s overall going pretty great. My students, more than any other group I’ve taught, are asking serious, thoughtful questions about not only the work that they’re doing in here but the world at large. They’re engaged at a theoretical and intellectual-historical level with many of the most challenging readings I’m assigning, from media theory to political science to...well, okay. De Certeau was not a hit. But conversations in class are energetic and productive. I see students taking notes on what their peers are saying. There’s chatting before and after class.

That’s a bunch of the good stuff that’s happening. But in the middle of all this rapturous success, I got the first major writing assignment back. Now, I had been teaching from Everything's an Argument, giving a fair amount of class time to the basic concepts: what is rhetorical analysis, what are the goals of doing it, who are the players in a given rhetorical exchange and how do we talk about persuasive tactics, their deployment by authors and their reception by audiences. It was immediately apparent, however, that something hadn’t clicked. I found myself writing “topical” in too many margins. In all the margins, really. Nearly all my students seemed to think that the goal was to create a report on an issue, rather than an account of a controversy.

See, I taught some lessons on rhetoric and analysis, but my idea going into the course, the idea that gave me all those goals that led to everybody having fun, is that you need to have something to say before you can write well. I still think that. But I’m learning to adjust the balance a little. In the middle of grading that first batch of papers, I assigned a blog post, asking my students to self-report their progress in the course so far and then to talk about what in the course had been most and least productive for them. The blog and De Certeau were the big losers. Class conversations and clips of Colbert were the big winners. Well, okay. That’s the student take.

Meanwhile, back in the Land of Always Grading, my take was that the goals of analysis were not clear. Audience and how to talk about it was still a hazy concept. What to do with ideas like ethos, pathos, logos, etc. was kind of a mystery to half the class. People were writing analytical summaries that were somewhere between a checklist of rhetoric class jargon and a paraphrase of their source. Ironies were missed, arguments flattened. I’m a pretty efficient grader but I was spending a half-hour per 7-page paper, even while consciously hurrying.

So the day after I finished that round of assignments, the reading was the Logos chapter from Everything is an Argument. I went through the usual rigamarole—“logos isn’t information, but refers to ways of using information persuasively”—and wasn’t getting much from them. Well, in situations like that, it’s nice to have an escape hatch more productive than “class dismissed” so I usually have a germaine youtube clip or two in mind. Stephen Colbert had interviewed Jim Garlow, a pastor leading the charge on the Pulpit Freedom Sunday movement. We watched a 3 minute clip and I asked “well what do you think” and they were off and running. All I had to do, was steer things away from the topical and into the analytical. Students were taking notes from each other again. We ran out of time so I assigned the whole segment that I took the clip from as reading for the next class, and set some guidelines about how to watch it. My entire lesson for that Thursday basically consisted of crowdsourcing an analytical summary. I’ll be posting that plan in the Lesson Plans section, but as a teaser on the results, less than a week on, every interaction I’ve had with a student I’ve seen them consciously, and quite productively reformulating their understanding of the course, its jargon, my goals, and their goals as a reader and writer.

What I learned from this is that you can’t chicken-and-egg the hard questions about teaching writing. You have to assume that the chicken and the egg coalesced in a moment of autochthnous primal simultanaeity and if they did it, so can you. In other words, what I’m learning this semester is the balance between teaching theory and teaching practice, between content and form, global and local, between facilitating conversations and intervening in them. I also learned that sometimes, when a conversation isn’t going well, saying “screw it” and showing them a funny video is the best thing you can possibly do.

Having Fun with Technology in the Classroom

Gulessarian — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 03:03:02 +0000

Author:

Lisa Gulesserian

Image Credit:

Stetson University

As instructors, we all know how haggard most students look on the day that a paper is due—the sunken cheeks, the bleary eyes, the undaunted yawns all signal to me that heady material isn’t going to be as quickly (or as enthusiastically) received as usual. So, many of us make it a point to have some sort of fun activity on the day that a paper is due. We all know the kind of activity I’m talking about—the kind where students don’t have to have read or prepare prior to coming to class. I’ve been experimenting lately with making fun, paper-due-date activities using the technologies available to us in the DWRL computer classrooms. My most recent experiment, when my students turned in Paper 2, was to see what happened if I asked my students to make 30-second long videos about their favorite city using iMovie. I was quite surprised with the results.

Whenever I introduce a novel activity like the iMovie workshop, I initially encounter some resistance. As I’m walking around the class to check on how my students are doing, I often notice that a few of my students are visibly frustrated with the new and unfamiliar program. Some of my students documented their discomfort in their Learning Record observations last week, and I learned that, for a couple students, the activity “was somewhat frustrating initially” and “interesting but very overwhelming at first.” Reading these types of observations reminds me that not all students are as tech-savvy as I assume they are.

These observations also help me think about ways to boost my students’ confidence and skills in the workshop environment. On my rounds, I often make a beeline for those struggling students and show them simple things on iMovie that have impressive effects (like adding text over the images that they imported into the program, or transitioning between images, or incorporating a map). With a small amount of confidence in their video editing skills, students let go of their inhibitions and start experimenting with the program’s many effects. In other observations, I learned that students “never realized all of the things you could do with [iMovie], from adding effects, to music, to words and sounds,” and that, for one student, “playing with iMovie on the computers during class was the highlight of my day!” These moments of confidence and skill-building are great results from such a low-stakes, unstructured, and fun activity.

Since the final project for my course, Rhetoric of Suburbs & Slums, is a group video, the iMovie workshop isn’t just an unrelated activity for the goals of my course. Students gain familiarity and a few skills in importing, editing, and exporting. Many students also end up reflecting on their own habits, such as one student who observed that “it was interesting to try a new program that I see everyday, but never open. It made me think about all the programs that are unused on my computer, sitting there, but never used. All it takes is a click to try something new, and it adds to my knowledge!” Another student stressed that “This quick tutorial showed me how to edit videos and slide shows in addition to adding effects. I'll definitely be able to use this skill in the future!” My main goal for this activity is to allow students to de-stress after a paper. Yet, sneakily, I’m preparing them for their final project, too.

I hope to continue experimenting with these low-stakes, high-fun classroom activities using new programs. After Friday’s wonderful AVRG workshop on “Using Video in the Literature and Rhetoric Classrooms,” I’m inspired to come up with other activities (such as the suggested classroom activity of juxtaposing recorded poems and images) for the day that Paper 1 is due in my literature class next semester…

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.

Mapping Community

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:38:54 +0000

Author:

Matt King

Image Credit:

Augustus Koch

In my RHE 309S: Critical Reading and Persuasive Writing course at UT Austin, my students are spending the semester studying communities of their choice. The first paper asked students to "map" their community, charting the people, places, events, social practices, and issues that help the community define and organize itself while also examining arguments made about the community. This assignment resembles one of our main first-year writing assignments which asks students to map the arguments made in response to a specific critical situation or issue. Focusing on communities, however, students might examine multiple relevant issues and also texts that aren't primarily argumentative.

One of the main challenges of the paper was arrangement: how can students demonstrate the ways that the constiuent elements of a community shape and respond to one another and the ways that arguments circulate within and around the community, further affecting its contours? Stasis theory was helpful in terms of organizing the arguments made about the community, and we also spent time in class creating mind maps to conceptually organize the various aspects of our communities (the Digital Writing and Research Lab has several lesson plans outlining specific mind mapping activities and assignments). These tools were helpful but abstract, and students ultimately found another component of the assignment more helpful in terms of getting a sense for the organization and development of their communities in time and space.

In addition to the written analysis of texts by and about the community in the paper, this assignment also asked students to produce a map or a timeline using Google Maps or Dipity (you can find the assignment description here). Google allows you to overlay content onto its maps, marking locations of interest and adding annotations, links, and embedded media, and Dipity's timelines offer similar opportunities for composing multimedia texts. These digital writing environments allowed students to engage their communities and relevant texts in new and often more productive ways. Many students felt that, after working on their maps and timelines, they were better prepared to map the broader contours of their communities in prose.

For example, one of our most challenging concepts for this assignment was kairos, attending to shifting contexts over time. Students could develop a sense for ways that an argument might respond to a recent event, but beyond this, kairos was difficult to wrap our heads around. The timeline activity proved particularly helpful here, as students were able to create representations that captured how their communities had changed over time. In a quick glance, we could see how different events and developments led to shifts in a community's priorities, its place in the public sphere, its sense of stability and cohesiveness, and its broader orientation toward the world.

Looking at some of these projects in greater depth gives a sense for the opportunities made available by mapping community in multimedia spaces. A student considering the remix artist community charted a history of recording technologies, the rise of the DJ, and the spread of dance halls going back to the phonograph. What would have taken up too much time and been too broad for the perspective of the paper became an insightful overview that placed remix artists in a long tradition of social practices organized around recorded sound. A student focusing on human trafficking explored global responses to this human rights violation by attaching policies to specific locations. In her paper, this student produced the most sophisticated analysis in the class, demonstrating a nuanced understanding of the relationship between specific groups within the community, their mode of response, and place, an understanding facilitated by her ability to map these relationships on a map. A student looking at the community invested in nanotechnologies traced relevant advancements back to the use of Damascus steel in swords, a practice whose techniques "created carbon nanotube fibers within the blades, giving the swords unparalleled strength and flexibility."

Maps and timelines offer students different logics and processes of engagement, translating communities from static entities to assemblages unfolding in time and space.

Crowdsourcing Narrative Techniques: TV Tropes in the Literature Classroom

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:28:00 +0000

Author:

Ashley Squires

Image Credit:

Randall Munroe

I tend to be one of those lit instructors who rarely brings up the dreaded "literary devices" in the classroom. Too often, handing out a list of tropes and techniques and asking students to recognize them in a text becomes a labelling exercise that does nothing to further the student's engagement with the work.

The wiki TV Tropes has begun to change my mind. A little bit. For those who are unfamiliar with the project (beware, you can while away many an otherwise productive hour on this site), TV Tropes is a wiki that crowdsources definitions and examples of various techniques used in various narrative media: manga, graphic novels, television shows, video games, films, and yes, "classic" literature. The editors describe the tone of the site as "breezy" and "informal," which often makes the entries as entertaining as they are informative. TV Tropes gets referenced frequently in fan communities and on media criticism websites.

What I like about this site is that it encourages both readers and writers to use narrative techniques (many if not most of which have appeared in Intro to Literature textbooks for ages) as a way of engaging with the text and the medium. As the post "TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life" says,

Analyzing a medium in depth and pulling it apart by the seams teaches you to watch things critically--analyzing every aspect and codifying them inside your mind.
Most tropers, academics, directors or writers who so this start to find new ways to enjoy media. The subtle blends of plots, the new spins on old stories. The rare and welcome times where a plot you weren't expecting appears. But it is never the same.
Enjoyment comes from a balance of Recognition and Surprise--we enjoy things that we can relate to and have seen before, but we also like to be surprised. Total recognition is cliche; total surprise is aleinating. Through comparing different works of fiction, browing TV Tropes will merge surprise almost entirely with recognition and you will begin analyzing everything and taking a totally new (and possibly better) enjoyment from media--or reality.

It's difficult to think of a better mission statement for an E314 literature classroom. Rather than labelling devices, learning about narrative techniques and tropes can be a way of encouraging students to think about the expectations they bring to a narrative and how those expectations are shaped by narratives they have already encountered.

The assignment I suggested in this semester's Lesson Plan attempts to use TV Tropes as a way of getting students to connect tropes to their experience with a particular narrative. This could work as a simple journaling exercise or even as a formal essay. Really ambitious instructors might have their students create their own wiki pages describing the tropes used in a particular work and linking them to other works that use those tropes in similar ways.

My interest in discussing tropes and techniques across media began with a student's essay on Dante's Inferno the video game, which is, of course, adapted from the poem, which we read part of in class. This led to a discussion about the ways in which Inferno translates nicely into a video game. Namely, it has a series of defineable "levels" (the circles of Hell) that become progressively more intense until you get to the Big Bad himself, Lucifer. However, a journey through Hell that consists mostly of talking to people and learning stuff about God and the nature of the cosmos isn't actually riveting content for a gamer to conquer, so naturally the game creators translated these levels into boss encounters and reimagined the narrative frame as a hero's quest. Dante is a veteran warrior (maybe sort of true, considering his family's involvement in the Guelph and Ghibeline conflict) and his beloved, Beatrice, is spirited away to Hell by Lucifer, who is much more like a Balrog than like the frozen, crying guy we see trapped at the center of the world in the poem. So, we also talked about how these changes are meeting the narrative demands of video games and meeting the expectations of the gamers.

The lesson plan I contributed this semester takes that conversation and translates it into a formalized activity that could be used for something as simple as a journal exercise or as elaborate as a formal essay or class wiki project. Students should take some time in class to famliarize themselves with TV Tropes and then take a short narrative work home to read. Instructors might provide a list of central tropes they might want their students to focus on but encourage them to explore on their own. Students should then begin identifying tropes within the assignment, connect those tropes to other works (either other class assignments or other narratives that come to mind) and write about how the author's specific use of that trope shapes their experience as a reader.

Some instructors may still find this to be too much like a labelling exercise, but done correctly, I think it has enormous potential to get students to engage with texts on a different level and begin thinking about the works they encounter in literature classes not as self-contained "classics" that have little to do with them or their lives but as texts that are embedded in a set of narrative conventions and expectations that have developed over the course of several millenia.

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