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Writing as Recursive Cultural Product

In John Trimbur's "Composition and the Circulation of Writing," he cites Richard Johnson's description the circulation of cultural texts as a recursive process of "production to textual forms to readings to lived culture" (196). The example used is the British Mini Metro Car, which originates as the "transformation of a 'designer's idea' [...] into a cultural product" (196). This process of production leads to the creation of a text, which is read in many different ways by various sectors of the public, and in this way ultimately becomes a part of lived culture. Essentially, in this imagination of the circulation of cultural texts, production and reading are processes that produces objects - texts and elements of culture. The process of creating texts in the classroom is similar in that students produce texts, which are then read by classmates and teachers, and the result of this reading becomes part of the classroom's 'culture,' the ongoing mood and relationship between students, their classmates, and their teacher. Like Johnson's process of circulation, this process of textual creation is also recursive, through revisions or through a repetition of the process on future papers. But, as I have discovered this semester, the danger is that just as flawed readings of texts can have negative impacts on lived culture, certain readings of texts can negatively impact the culture of the classroom.

The challenge inherent in the recursive process of textual production in the classroom is making sure that students do not become what Trimbur refers to as "cultural dupes" (198). Although he uses this term in reference to the cultural studies classroom, what he's actually referring to is the necessity to teach students how to read a cultural text, and the composition teacher faces a similar challenge. Composition teachers must instruct students on how to become good readers as well as good writers, for the two go hand in hand. In order for students to give productive readings to their peers' papers - in workshops, for example - they must be instructed on the process of how to properly read a text, how to understand the rhetorical situation that has produced a paper. They must be able to understand how context, audience, and purpose influence a text. They must have a grasp of appropriate elements of design for a particular assignment, and when a writer must execute a particular stance appropriate for a particular situation. In addition, the composition student must be trained in how to interpret the teacher's reading of their text, to understand why certain elements of the paper worked and why others did not and how to incorporate suggestions for improvement into revised texts. Like Johnson's description of the circulation of cultural texts, the process of creating texts in a composition classroom is also recursive.

How Much Grading is Too Much Grading?

In "Students, Authorship, and the Work of Composition," Bruce Horner quotes David Bartholomae, who states, "the most precious thing I can do is provide spaces where I don't also [in addition to the culture] do [students'] thinking for them" (qtd. in Horner 512). Peter Elbow takes this philosophy a step further by removing the pressure of grades from his students' composition papers. In my own grading, I take a position that is the polar opposite from this, copiously grading students' papers and making as many notes as I can regarding how students can improve their papers. On the one hand, the risk is that I am stifling students' creativity by telling them exactly how to revise their papers. on the other, students will be expected in their other classes to meet certain mandated standards of appropriate writing. While proponents of the former philosophy might argue that these standards are set in a manner that promotes an imbalanced social contract, I feel that purposefully overlooking potential weaknesses in student papers for the sake of their autonomy as authors as a way of hopefully balancing the scales is ultimately doing them a disservice.

With that being said, I do often wonder if I'm a little too enthusiastic in my rooting out of potential weaknesses in student papers. I find myself spending sometimes as much as fifteen to twenty minutes (or more) per student paper, carefully cataloging every way that a student could improve their organization, clarify their thoughts, provide more evidence, or analyze more deeply. By the time that I'm done grading student papers, almost every page is covered with margin notes and line edits, and I often suspect that there comes a point when it's too much, when students shut down and become unwilling to read all my scribblings in the margins, or worse yet, when my notes only confuse or discourage them. Not to mention the fact that the amount of time I spend grading papers becomes impractical. I wonder if maybe I am doing what Bartholomae warns against, failing to prove a space where my students can do their own thinking in their writing rather than having me do all the thinking for them. I wonder if I wouldn't be doing my students (and myself) more of a service to prioritize and focus in on the one or two most serious problems in each student's paper.

A blog post that's trying to do too many things at once

Ok, so this week we were urged to try to include some multimedia stuff in our blog posts and also to respond to one of our classmates' blog entries, and finally to respond to the "Building a Mystery" article. In order to accomplish all of these things, I'm going to step away from the usual formal response format that my blog entries usually take and just sort of wing it.

First, regarding the Robert Davis and Mark Shadle's article, I think the thing that interested me most was the idea of multimedia/multigenre research essay. One of the student examples listed, the biography of John Lennon that was tied together through poetry and written in the form of a play seemed like an interesting, unique, and original approach to a genre that students undoubtedly find stale and boring by now. I'm interested in doing more of these sorts of assignments with my students. Another example listed in the article is allowing students to write a sort of 'what-if' biography, particularly useful for those students with troubled backgrounds that they may not be comfortable sharing. I wonder if maybe the next time I teach a 101 class, it might be beneficial to modify the personal narrative photo-essay. Say, have the students bring in three photos and tell them that they're going to use it in a personal essay about an event from their past, and then after they've chosen their photos, turn the assignment on its head by telling the students that they're going to instead write about an imaginary event in their history. The benefits to this, I think, would be that it would eliminate many of the 'my grandfather died and it sucked' essays that seem to be the tried and true fallback for most freshman comp students. Also, it would allow students to use their imaginations in potentially wonderful ways, while also alleviating some of the boredom they might otherwise feel with this assignment. And finally, rather than having to find a way to relate what the learned - the moral of the story, if you will - to a general audience, the student is faced with the potentially more challenging rhetorical task of formulating a 'so what?' for an event that they haven't experienced. Rather than moralizing, they'd have to speculate.

Davis and Shadle also mention multimedia essays, which sort of makes me think back to last week's article on multimodality, one that particularly interested me because I'm interested in introducing multimodality more fully into my classes. For the second part of 102, the rhetorical analysis, I had my students read and analyze a Ray Bradbury short story entitled "There Will Come Soft Rains." One of the things that I had students do is watch a Youtube cartoon version of the story, which has some pretty obvious plot deviations from the original story, and I had them analyze how the different media affect the narrative, why they affect it in that way, and what the two forms allow their respective authors to do differently. Below is the video:



But I wonder if there's some way to have students do more than merely view and respond to video posts. I wonder if there's some way to actually have students get more involved in these sorts of multimodal assignments by recording their own audio media or integrating video into classroom presentations or even, somehow, their papers. Sure, maybe this would only complicate things, and I don't see how this could be accomplished without making the papers a primarily web-based assignment, but with so much of our culture going digital anyway, is that necessarily a bad thing? I also found this video of a student-produced live action version of "There Will Come Soft Rains":



Now, I'm sure that most college freshmen would turn their noses up at the thought of being involved in something this amateurish and silly, but there are a host of other avenues they could explore. Even merely finding one of these videos on Youtube and finding a way to integrate them into their papers requires an additional level of thought and consideration that can only benefit the students.

And finally, the last part of my blog post (yes, I know, bad transition. If I were grading my own response I'd write 'Work on transitions/organization!" in the margins) is to respond to a posting by another student. Emily, I read your recent post on your students not bringing rough drafts to class, and allow me to say that I feel your pain. I had the exact same thing happen this past Thursday. I told my students on Tuesday that we were going to be workshopping rough drafts on the next class meeting, and that they should not come if they were unprepared (basically the same scenario you described). In my 8:00 class, only 5 people showed up. Now, the good news is we had one hell of a good workshopping session for their papers, because we were able to all participate in one group, help each other brainstorm, and give each other hands-on guidance. Still, I have to admit that it's so annoying to think that the other 10 or 15 students in that class were simply too lazy, too unmotivated, or too whatever to even bother with an attempt. Or maybe they didn't know how to begin and were afraid to ask for help, which I guess is another problem altogether. Still, for whatever reason you and I experienced this situation, at least you can rest assured you're not alone.

Multimodality in the Composition Classroom

In "Thinking about Multimodality," Pamela Takayoshi and Cynthia L. Selfe suggest a new sort of composition that extends its focus beyond the written text to include audio, video, still images, and digital media. They address many fears that they anticipate teachers might experience, such as a concern that they will have to juggle the responsibilities of both a technology teacher and a composition teacher, and that this new focus on multiple forms of media in assignments will cause students' ability to mastery of the crucial written mode of communication to suffer. But Takayoshi and Selfe ultimately decide that the possible rewards outweigh the risks, as the growing importance of new technologically-based forms of communication necessitate new types of student fluency. In our own composition classes, we have already taken strides towards addressing multimodality in composition. In Composition 101, we require students to integrate still images into their personal narratives. And in Composition 102, Blackboard allows us to easily integrate audio and video texts into our required reading lists. What I hope to do in future courses I teach is to further integrate multiple modes of composition into student assignments.

This semester, I've included multiple modes of texts for my students to read, requiring them to watch a film version of "There Will Come Soft Rains" and comparing how the medium of film presents the content of the short story in a completely different manner, how it allows the author to do things that the original author, Ray Bradbury, was not able to do in a purely textual medium. I've also included audio texts in my syllabus. When focusing on musicians as a discourse community and how they write about technology, I played for my students some examples of mash-ups, a form that Philip Gunderson describes as "the New Age of Composition." Allowing students to experience additional media beyond text gives them the chance to better comprehend what Gunderson means when he coins this term.

What I've yet to do is actually integrate multimodality into my students' assignments. One of the things I'm considering for next time I teach Composition 102 is the inclusion of a wiki page and possibly a Facebook page into class instruction. In addition to musicians, another discourse community that we focused on this semester is educators. We read an article about the uses of Myspace and Facebook, as well as another article about the use of technology in the classroom. I think it might be beneficial to help students understand these articles by experiencing firsthand how webpages such as Facebook or wiki pages can be useful in the classroom for allowing students and teachers to keep in touch and share multimedia resources.

Introducing multimodality into the Composition classroom is a gradual process. Many of the concerns Takayoshi and Selfe discuss in their article are apprehensions that I share. Preparing classroom syllabi and lessons is already a time consuming process, and attempting to integrate additional resources and technologies into the classroom will only add to the amount of time spent in preparation. Furthermore, merely deciding how to integrate these additional resources in a truly profitable manner is another challenge. Nevertheless, the instances in which I've introduced multimedia resources into the classroom have proven to be among the most rewarding for both the students and myself, and I would love to continue to do so in the future, and in particular I would like to devise ways to have the students participate in the creation of multimodal forms of composition rather than merely experiencing them.

Technology and the Accumulation of Literacy

In "Accumulating Literacy," Deborah Brandt discusses, among other things, "the enduring power of dominant classes to define language standards" and "[...] the emerging power of a highly educated, technocratic elite [...]" (659). In the story of Sam May, she describes how his literacy advanced through the years, and how it was affected, in particular, by new technologies such as radio and television. This narrative is relevant to our classrooms, because new technologies, particularly the internet, are having a profound impact on our students' abilities to acquire literacy. And while Brandt's claim that the dominant classes can use these new technologies to control literacy is interesting, it's also true that technology, particularly access or lack of access to it, can be used to limit literacy. This ability to control access to literacy promotes and protects an already established class structure by limiting upward mobility through education.

This aspect of Brandt's essay struck me as most interesting because this semester one of my students is an alumnus from the K-12 school at which I taught for several years in the early 00's. I taught this student in both seventh and eighth grade, and while he excelled among his peers, he's now struggling within my classroom. He told me that he's one of only three students from his graduating class that managed to make it into college. But one of the concerns he has expressed to me is an unfamiliarity with the technologies that play a role in college academics. This concern is especially relevant, since the theme of my course is technology. In particular, this student has struggled with Blackboard because he's relatively unfamiliar with internet usage and web browsers.

My student's lack of familiarity with web browsers and the internet represents how the limiting of the proliferation of technology can be used to maintain a regimented class system. In Tchula, Mississippi, where this student attended school, there was no widespread broadband access as recently as five years ago, when I taught there. While the school where I taught had internet access, it only worked sporadically, and very slowly when it did work. Almost none of my students had internet access at home; some of them didn't always have electricity. The fact that the internet has become such a crucial piece of educational technology in the classroom ensures that people and places with limited broadband access - primarily people from lower economic classes - will remain firmly placed in the social tier they currently inhabitant.

The fact that the student in question was able to escape Tchula and attend college at all suggests that the possibility to achieve literacy despite the limitation of technology still exists. However, now that the educational environment has become a technocracy, individuals who are not proficient with modern technology in general and the internet in particular will find themselves at a disadvantage when it comes to acquiring literacy in today's educational climate.