Pathways
Greetings everyone. Thanks for the lively discussion about digital composing yesterday. When all was said and done I feared I had somehow managed to come across as suggesting we're dealing with an either/or proposition here in terms of "old" essay/"new" essay, "traditional" comp/digital comp, etc. There's in fact a fertile range of hybrid, middle positions here, and we'll help both ourselves (as individual teachers of writing, as a discipline, etc.) and our students if we're mindful of that territory in whatever modest ways we can. As with many of our classroom practices and beliefs, the goal is to reach as many students as possible, to validate their voices, to give them the rhetorical skills to go out and succeed in the world (Jake said it well yesterday in stating that we want students, ultimately, not so much to be able to write a lab report or a research paper as to be better, more able, more confident "composers").
By acknowledging other sets of literacy skills, my sense is that I have additional pathways to those students who may not be strong in alphabetic literacy; meanwhile, the students who are strong in alphabetic literacy can become more diversely aware and skilled rhetoricians. And there is the fact (even if it's not yet visible to most as the huge paradigm shift it will eventually be seen to be) that new media (and don't forget that pen and paper were once new "writing technologies," too) put us -- as writers, as students, as teachers -- in a new relation to writing. Because the history of literacy shows us that we can expect profound changes in the ways we make meaning and compose, will we (in English departments, in Composition programs, in the arts generally) resolve to be in the camp of the inventors, the determiners?
By the way, speaking of "pathways," I just chanced upon this passage from Patricia Dunn's terrific book, Talking, Sketching, Moving: Multiple Literacies in the Teaching of Writing. See what you think: "There are at least three strong reasons to use multiple, alternate strategies to teach writing. First, because words are so powerful, we must use all available means to help students discover the power of words and their own power to use them. As Robert Scholes wrote, 'Textual power is ultimately power to change the world.' Second, we must reach as many students as possible and we must help them reach their full potential. Third, and at the very least, we must 'do no harm.' Using multiple ways of knowing also addresses a pedagogical injustice that is both systemic and local. Throughout most of the educational system, and especially in writing classes, students are forced to use linguisto-centric tools to perform virtually all intellectual tasks."
"Composition is partly failing on all three counts. We are not using all available means of helping students realize and use the power of written text. We are relying too much on linguistic pathways, probably because that' s our preferred inroad, and we're not taking full advantage of what students can teach us about oral, spatial, visual, social, or other ways of knowing. Therefore, we are excluding people. In addition, the linguistically talented students who tell us they 'love English' are not developing as much as they could be as thinkers because they (and we) are missing the insights from pathways others could show us. Finally, we might be doing harm, albeit inadvertently, to students who know things in ways we do not. They fail our courses, but it is we who are failing them. We disrespecting their other intellectual contributions, even as we are losing what they could teach us."
For those few nuts out there who might want to pursue this line of thinking, and who might be interested in the argument that connects digital expression with classical rhetoric (part of the argument goes that hypertext and new media evoke the older rhetorical arts of linking, cataloging, annotating, collecting, etc.), you might check out Richard Lanham's wonderful (and seminal) book, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (1993).
By acknowledging other sets of literacy skills, my sense is that I have additional pathways to those students who may not be strong in alphabetic literacy; meanwhile, the students who are strong in alphabetic literacy can become more diversely aware and skilled rhetoricians. And there is the fact (even if it's not yet visible to most as the huge paradigm shift it will eventually be seen to be) that new media (and don't forget that pen and paper were once new "writing technologies," too) put us -- as writers, as students, as teachers -- in a new relation to writing. Because the history of literacy shows us that we can expect profound changes in the ways we make meaning and compose, will we (in English departments, in Composition programs, in the arts generally) resolve to be in the camp of the inventors, the determiners?
By the way, speaking of "pathways," I just chanced upon this passage from Patricia Dunn's terrific book, Talking, Sketching, Moving: Multiple Literacies in the Teaching of Writing. See what you think: "There are at least three strong reasons to use multiple, alternate strategies to teach writing. First, because words are so powerful, we must use all available means to help students discover the power of words and their own power to use them. As Robert Scholes wrote, 'Textual power is ultimately power to change the world.' Second, we must reach as many students as possible and we must help them reach their full potential. Third, and at the very least, we must 'do no harm.' Using multiple ways of knowing also addresses a pedagogical injustice that is both systemic and local. Throughout most of the educational system, and especially in writing classes, students are forced to use linguisto-centric tools to perform virtually all intellectual tasks."
"Composition is partly failing on all three counts. We are not using all available means of helping students realize and use the power of written text. We are relying too much on linguistic pathways, probably because that' s our preferred inroad, and we're not taking full advantage of what students can teach us about oral, spatial, visual, social, or other ways of knowing. Therefore, we are excluding people. In addition, the linguistically talented students who tell us they 'love English' are not developing as much as they could be as thinkers because they (and we) are missing the insights from pathways others could show us. Finally, we might be doing harm, albeit inadvertently, to students who know things in ways we do not. They fail our courses, but it is we who are failing them. We disrespecting their other intellectual contributions, even as we are losing what they could teach us."
For those few nuts out there who might want to pursue this line of thinking, and who might be interested in the argument that connects digital expression with classical rhetoric (part of the argument goes that hypertext and new media evoke the older rhetorical arts of linking, cataloging, annotating, collecting, etc.), you might check out Richard Lanham's wonderful (and seminal) book, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (1993).
posted by Eric at 10:15 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home