And the Debate Goes On: Lundberg and Gunn's Response to Geisler

Lundberg, Christian, and Joshua Gunn. “‘Ouija Board, Are There Any Communications?’: Agency, Ontotheology, and the Death of the Humanistic Subject, or, Continuing the ARS Conversation.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35.4 (2005): 83-105. Print.

In Lundberg and Gunn’s response to Cheryl Geisler’s piece on the ARS convention (see my previous post), they raise the concern that Geisler’s “report” had less to do with accurately reporting on the metting than arguing against the postmodern (or posthumanist, to use their term) views of agency. They argue that Geisler’s attempt to locate agency in the agent is a problematic attempt to maintain a view of the agent as autonomous and a mistaken conflation of the agent with agency. Such a view, they claim, is narrow in its conception of agency. They also characterize as narrow Geisler’s representation of posthumanist theories.

They begin their discussions likening the agent/agency relationship to the playing of an Ouija board, establishing an indeterminate view of agency. (After all, any one player or some other worldly spirit may be moving the planchette.) This indeterminate view represents for them the more postmodern view of rhetorical agency. Rather than trying to locate agency within the subject or the rhetor, they argue that agency can and does exist in a number of potential agents. The subject, too, is influenced by a number of external influences and is thus “produced” (86), making it harder to claim that the subject can always have agency.

But rather than this “problematized” sense of agency leading to agential paralysis or precluding the possibility of the agent having any rhetorical effects, they claim that the posthumanist view examines the agent/agency relationship as only one trope that allows us to investigate and interrogate these ideas (98). This is part of their desire for a “restless and relentless thinking” (98) about subjects like agency to add multiple, complicating, and ultimately illuminating layers to that idea.

In many respects, I find their discussions thought-provoking. I, too, agree that a continual examination of the relationship of the agent and agency and of the possibility of locating agency within entities and forces beyond the sbuject will give us a deeper understanding of them. However, I tend to agree with Geisler, who in her response to this piece, claimed that this theorizing does not really get at her pedagogical concerns about rhetorical agency (109). Indeed, theory takes a dominant place in Lunberg and Gunn’s article, and I too wondered where the rhetorical rubber is to meet the pedagogical road. Certainly, theorizing agency will ultimately serve many benefits in developing how we view and analyze agency, but we should not theorize exclusively or at the expense of pedagogy either.

Work Cited

Geisler, Cheryl. “Teaching the Post-Modern Rhetor: Continuing the Conversation on Rhetorical Agency.” Rhetorical Society Quarterly 35.4 (2005): 107-12. Print.

The First Shot of the Geisler and Lundbeg/Gunn Debate on Agency

Geisler, Cheryl. “How Ought We Understand the Concept of Rhetorical Agency?: Report from the ARS.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34.3 (2004): 9-17. Print.

Geisler claims her goal in this brief article is to recount the meeting of the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies (ARS) meeting that addressed rhetorical agency. Specifically, this meeting developed into a discussion of how to combine the interpretive practices of rhetoric with its productive ones, especially in the wake of postmodern critiques of agency that had weakened or threatened the importance of rhetorical agency. As she “reports” on the meeting, though, she challenges those who claimed that rhetorical agency is illusory and ultimately argues that rhetorical agency is crucial for educating students and for the future of rhetoric as a discipline.

Scholars at the ARS meeting generally agreed on two issues. One was the definition of rhetorical agency: “the capacity of the rhetor to act” (12). The second area of agreement was the idea that postmodern critiques of the possibility against rhetorical agency necessitated renewed discussions of it. She notes that some of the postmodern critiques are applicable to public rhetorical agency, but she claims that the greater access to agency that “subaltern groups” have and the growing questions about agency because of new media are creating an atmosphere in which rhetorical agency may need to be considered in entirely new ways.

In addressing these critiques and the new directions of agency, the attendees addressed the illusions of agency, the importance of the rhetor’s skill, and the conditions of agency. The last two she covers relatively quickly. Regarding the rhetor’s skill, she addresses Jasinski’s claims of viewing the rhetor as an orchestrator who must bring together and respond to fragmented and contingent circumstances (a combination of autonomy and external influences). In her discussion of the conditions of agency, she mentions the discussions that centered on the material and historical constraints that influence rhetors today. But she focuses mostly on illusions of agency. She notes that some, like Joshua Gunn, argued that agency is an illusion and as such we should acknowledge this and “directly [confront] our irrelevance” (12). Such a move, she argues, not only makes the educational mission of rhetoric nearly impossible (if students don’t have agency, how are they to act through rhetoric?) but will also remove any potential for change and any meaningful responsibility for people to act. Thus, rhetoric cannot focus only on its interpretive mission; it must also include a productive mission as well.

While this article consists of fewer than ten pages of discussion, it is densely packed with some useful synopses of some of the most significant discussions about rhetorical agency that have been taking place over the last few years. She makes a strong case for the need to tie interpretive modes of rhetoric to productive ones, especially as they inform educational practices. Furthermore, she offers some sense of how postmodern ideas of contingency and fragmentation can and do work with notions of rhetorical agency. However, as I will address in my next blog post, some who attended the ARS meeting felt Geisler misrepresented some of the discussions took place.

Neurons, Obama, and Rhetoric--Oh My!

Cooper, Marilyn M. “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted.” CCC 62.3 (2011): 420-49. Print.

Like Leff in my previous blog posting, Cooper examines rhetorical agency as an idea called into question and seeming more unlikely (even impossible by some accounts). But rather than specifically examining the role of tradition as a means to recuperate ideas of rhetorical agency like Leff, Cooper examines the possibilities of more recent notions, especially complexity theory and neurophenomenolgy to examine how agency is both autonomous and collective, both conscious and unconscious.

Complexity theory positions rhetorical agency within a system of multiple agents that interact with one another in a sort of perpetual “dance of perturbation and response” by which the agents influence one another (421). Neruophenomenology—which I must admit is a concept I need to reexamine more fully—“combines neuroscience and phenomenology to develop understandings of cognitive processes and brain dynamics as embodied nonlinear self-organizing systems interacting with the surround” (421).

Cooper uses this combination of ideas to analyze President Obama’s speech on race that he delivered in Philadelphia during his presidential candidacy. She argues, first, that rhetorical agency is both an active response by an individual to a particular situation (emergent) and a series of unconscious neurological processes and internalized contextual understandings (embodied). Second, she argues that both rhetors and audiences are active agents in the process of persuasion. Rhetors often view themselves somewhat incorrectly as causing action or persuasion, though she says this is necessary for our ability to act and to be willing to act as agents; instead, she claims that persuasion also rests in the audience members’ reception and evaluation of the rhetor’s language. Thus, while the rhetor does maintain certain, significant amounts of free will, she/he has a responsibility to the audience to view them “as responsive beings who [. . .] will understand or assimilate meanings in their own way” (441).

As a side note, though my grasp of neuroscience’s role in rhetoric is rather tenuous and too limited to offer a strong evaluation of Cooper’s use of it in her argument, I can say this is one of the more approachable pieces on “neurorhetoric” that I have encountered at this point. More to the point, despite some of the claims reminiscent of the cognitive arguments that developed at the height of the process movement and Leff’s analysis of classical rhetoric’s view of audience (see my previous blog post), Cooper’s article offers a sense of new directions in the considerations of rhetorical agency—ones that bring to bear the new understandings of the interactions of the biological, the psychological, and the social aspects of communication.

821 Blog 2: What's Old Is New

Leff, Michael. “Tradition and Agency in Humanistic Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.2 (2003): 135-47. Print.

Michael Leff’s attention in this article is the connection he sees between “tradition” (or what we might term classical rhetoric) and rhetorical agency. In particular, he is interested in exploring the tension of individual rhetorical agency and the influence of community on the rhetor. From his perspective, the rhetorical tradition serves as a sort of mediator between the ideas of writing as an individual and writing as a member of a community (or writing for an audience in general).

Leff establishes his sense of the postmodern conceptions of both tradition and agency by claiming that postmodern views oversimplify how traditional/classical rhetoricians actually addressed agency. For example, he points to postmodern claims that clascial oratory was unidirectional (from the rhetor) and that the audience played an essentially passive role. But he notes that these views are inaccurate to the realities of traditional rhetoric. While he acknowledges that many rhetoricians of the classical period did address (quite strongly in some instances) the importance of the rhetor’s ability to persuade (even manipulate?) the audience, he argues that classical views were much more complex. Leff instead provides numerous examples (from Isocrates to Cicero) of rhetoricians discussing the influence of the audience over the rhetorical choices made by the rhetor. Thus the rhetor is both shaped by the community and an individual participant within that community. He looks to Isocrates as an example of this, particularly his address on changes to Athenian democracy he hoped to see initiated. Isocrates carefully selected his sources and worked within the expectations of the community not to upset their perspectives on democracy but to advocate for the changes he wanted.

Though brief, the historical context that this article provides on rhetorical agency is quite helpful. It complicates the views of traditional/classical sensibilities as more social than many tend to think of them (or at least as he claims some tend to think of them). His focus on classical rhetoricians underscores the importance of the rhetorical past, advocating that we cannot and should not shrug off tradition simply because we have “new” perspectives that we think conflict with past notions. However, I feel that Leff approaches some of these complicated theoretical notions too briefly. He accuses postmodern theorists of oversimplifying the practices of traditional rhetoricians, yet I feel he does much the same to the postmoderns, suggesting in a few sweeping sentences to have captured their entire view of classical rhetoric. Indeed, this fosters the very sorts of neglect that concern him. Perhaps what we need is not only a willingness to examine past theories more deeply but present ones as well.

Rhetoric and/or/not Composition?

Horner, Bruce, and Min-Zhan Lu. “Working Rhetoric and Composition.” College English 72.5 (2010): 470-94. Print.

In this article, Horner and Lu examine the seemingly settled relationship of rhetoric and composition, exploring how these terms are used in the field and what relationships (political, pedagogical, and theoretical) are implied by certain uses of the terms. Their argument rests on the idea that for rhetoric and composition to be a flexible discipline, the understandings of “rhetoric” and “composition” need to be constantly revised to reflect the histories and the changes in material conditions of the work of the discipline.

They begin by plotting the various uses of rhetoric, composition, and rhetoric and composition. They find that these terms are either synonymous with each other, with writing, and/or with English; that the terms are rarely defined; and that rhetoric and composition often appear in a hierarchical relationship. Such uses of these terms, they argue, effectively hamstring the possibility of a dynamic and non-hegemonic discipline. They emphasize the need for a more conscious sense of what these terms mean to us and for a more developed sense of “the histories and conditions” of the work of rhetoric and composition (475).

To apply these methods of “working” rhetoric and composition, Horner and Lu examine how this work would affect the first-year writing course and graduate level courses. For them, a more productive first-year writing course would resist “the dichotomizing of rhetoric and composition” (480) that arises in debates about the role of the course—service or something else, for example. Their vision is a course focused on rhetorical concerns but those that arise from and are to be “reworked” in student writing. They see some graduate curricula as positioning rhetoric as historical and composition as pedagogical and theoretical. Such a separation limits students’ abilities to fully contextualize both the history and theory/pedagogy of the discipline and reinforces the hierarchical relationships that keep the two separate. On a broader scale, then, they are looking to a more inclusive sense of rhetoric and composition, one that values both the theory and the practice as mutually informing instead of mutually exclusive.

Admittedly, I take for granted the relationship of rhetoric and composition and rarely give much thought to how I use the terms, how I view their relationship to one another, and how this may reinforce certain hierarchies between the two. And though I am hesitant to discount the need for “real world” writing skills in undergraduate composition courses (as they seem to want) and have no experience teaching graduate courses on which to evaluate their claims about graduate programs, I do find their sense of the entrenching positions of rhetoric and of composition as doing the discipline a disservice. Throughout the article, they pose numerous questions that anyone seriously exploring rhetoric and composition and their relation to one another needs to consider.

664 Blog 5: New Assessment Practices for New Texts

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Looking for Sources of Coherence in a Fragmented World: Notes toward a New Assessment Design.” Computers and Composition 21 (2004): 89-102. Rpt. in Computers in the Composition Classroom: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Michelle Sidler, Richard Morris, and Elizabeth Overman Smith. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 293-307. Print.

Kathleen Blake Yancey speaks to a gap (though one that is shrinking now) between the common promotion of intertextuality in the digital age and our assessment of the resulting multimodal texts. We often still rely on print sensibilities to evaluate and assess digital texts and are, as she says, “held hostage to the values informing print, values worth preserving for that medium, to be sure, but values incongruent with those informing the digital” (293). Therefore, she calls for a new language of assessment for the new types of texts our students may be producing.

The key area she addresses here is the idea of coherence. She first emphasizes that coherence refers to relationships. In print texts, these relationships rely mostly on the relationship of words to each other and to the context in which they appear. Coherence in such texts often remains relatively stable, and this stability establishes certain values about what constitutes “good” writing. This leads her to a slight (but useful) tangent regarding word-processing software’s effects on assessment, including surface correctness promoted by grammar- and spell-checkers and instructor dominance of texts aided by the ease of commentary allowed by such software. Recognizing these matters is an important move toward stronger assessments of digitally-produced texts.

After developing this awareness, instructors must be aware that coherence in digital texts is more complex than what we discover in most print texts. Yancey’s solution to assessing these multiple and multimodal coherences is a heuristic model that establishes a fixed schema but one that remains flexible for the various types of multimodal texts in may need to respond to. Her heuristic consists of four questions:

1. What arrangements are possible?
2. Who arranges?
3. What is the intent?
4. What is the fit between the intent and the effect? (301)

She then applies this model heuristic to examine the coherence of emails and, more valuable to instructors, to a digital portfolio to demonstrate (convincingly, at least in her terms) how these questions emphasize digital values of coherence.

Yancey’s article is certainly valuable to instructors who are planning to assign writing projects that ask students to compose with various digital tools and produce multimodal texts. First, those instructors do need to consider how they are assessing digital texts and whether their values still come from print or if they are making the shift to more digital values. Second, her heuristic provides a starting template instructors can tweak to fit more local contexts as needed and one that reminds instructors to focus on the multiple coherences of digital texts. However, Yancey does not provide much detail regarding assessments of content or language. Should our assessment of these areas rely on print values, or should this change as well? And if so, what would those changes look like? While these questions are beyond the scope of her article, instructors still must remember to consider more than coherence as they reevaluate their assessment practices.

664 Blog 4: Two Steps Forward, (at least) One Step Back

Stout, Roland. “Good Writing Assignments = Good Thinking: A Proven WID Philosophy.” Language and Learning across the Disciplines 2.2 (1997): 9-17. The WAC Clearing House. Colorado State University. Web. 26 May 2011.

As I have been searching through different journals and collections, I have been looking for both theoretical and practical discussions of assignment development and evaluation. The title of this article initially attracted me, as I agree with the WAC/WID notions that writing is a means of thinking. And, since a chemistry professor wrote the article, I hoped to gain some insight into interdisciplinary perspectives on writing assignments. The article argues that instructors who develop a clear sense of what they want students to learn will be able to develop effective writing assignments that encourage more meaningful thinking in students. But the perspectives of writing offered here make this article problematic.

First, I want to address the benefits of this article, for what this professor attempts is exactly the kind of work writing instructors in English studies should be promoting, at least generally. Stout promotes helping students learn to think as members of a discipline, making the work they do more relevant to them and helping them retain and more meaningfully apply information. He also promotes a number of other elements writing instructors will likely applaud: writing as a process; deeper, more thoughtful revisions of texts; considerations of different rhetorical situations by having students write texts in different genres and for different audiences. Finally, he talks about developing assignments and exam questions that require different levels of thinking These all help students better understand various abstract chemistry concepts and are all notions many writing instructors endorse.

Despite Stout’s beneficial approaches, some of the assumptions about writing are troubling. The vast majority of these assumptions arise quite early in the piece, and some may even serve to undermine the good work his assignments attempt. First, much of how he defines “good” writing seems to rely on grammar and style. He wants “clear, concise writing” and note that “poor writing” consists of “awkward phrasing, improper grammar, illogical word choices” (10). Second, he seems to avoid much responsibility for teaching his students how to write well in his terms. He claims that he will help the students learn but immediately notes that, because he lacks specific training in writing instruction, he requires his students to go to the writing center. Furthermore, most of the commentary on students’ drafts prior to final drafts comes from their peers and from tutors, not from the professor (10-11). In short, this article seems to promote (even if unintentionally) ideas that good writing is superficially correct and that responsibility for writing instruction is minimally or not at all on instructors in the discipline, even if they rely on writing assignments in their classrooms. In considering the work that we and our colleagues from different disciplines do regarding writing assignments, we must attempt to challenge those assumptions that undermine more sound pedagogical practices, while praising the positive work our colleagues do to promote writing.

664 Blog 3: Assignments and Assumptions

Clark, Irene. “A Genre Approach to Writing Assignments.” Composition Forum 14.2 (2005): n. pag. CompositionForum. Web. 27 May 2011.

In my previous blog posting, I pointed out Bartholomae’s claim that certain language in writing assignments can contain discipline-specific expectations that we, as instructors, may take for granted. Irene Clark’s article furthers this discussion by arguing that relying on a genre approach to writing can help students discover and address these assumptions more effectively, and she suggests that viewing assignments themselves as a genre will help us recognize the assumptions buried in them. Such assumptions are often disciplinary, but Clark notes the socio-historical influences on views of education at a given time. These perceptions of what education is or should do markedly influence the goals of assignments. Thus, the aims of assignments are social as well as pedagogical, adding another layer of complexity that students often fail to understand fully. Furthermore, instructors themselves may even miss the assumed goals they are including in their assignments and see the problem as resting wholly on the students.

One of the key problems she notes is that those constructing assignments understand their language as transparent but this language carries with it the need for the student to construct “an appropriate textual self suitable for the writing task” (par. 7). Clark claims that “uptake” can help to illuminate this problem. Uptake unites a primary text and its “interpretant,” or a text that results from a primary text—the uptake text. In this case, a writing assignment would be the primary text; the interpretant would be a student’s essay in response to that text. If a student fails to recognize certain goals or assumptions in the primary text, he or she is likely to produce a less successful interpretant. Such practices privilege certain knowledge and discourse, not always readily available to our students. Therefore, students who already understand these situtions continue to do well, while those students on the periphery struggle.

Not only does Clark provide instructors with problems to consider regarding assignment design; she also offers three strategies for alleviating these problems. First, she suggests adding an element of role-playing. As she noted early in the article, students need to assume a role in response to the writing prompt. Helping students recognize this need will better enable them to address the topic with more authority than if they were to focus on the topic as another writing assignment situated only in the context of the course. Second, she suggests encouraging students to write for a discipline-specific audience; thus students may be more able to understand certain expectations that the audience may have and what it means to write for an audience. Finally, she reminds instructors to be more aware of the genre of the writing assignment, with all of its subtlety. Doing so helps instructors make the implicit more explicit, to the benefit of the students and the texts they produce. And indeed, Clark’s warnings and strategies provide instructors with some valuable tools to use when crafting their own writing assignments.

664 Blog 2: Assignments "Inventing the University"

Bartholomae, David. “Writing Assignments: Where Writing Begins.” Fforum Fall (1982): 35-46. Rpt. in Writing on the Margins: Essays on Composition and Teaching. Ed. David Bartholomae. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005. 177-91. Print.

This article appears three years before David Bartholomae’s seminal “Inventing the University,” but here, too, he claims that students “invent the university”—they attempt to approximate academic and disciplinary language and knowledge—when they write (177). The job of instructors, then, is to provide students with meaningful and challenging ways into the discourse of the university through carefully crafted and scaffolded assignments.

Bartholomae emphasizes two assignment principles (though others work their way in through these discussions). The first principle is indoctrination. For an assignment to indoctrinate students in academic and/or disciplinary discourse, it must build on their abilities to enter into such discourses, to “lead students through successive approximations” of them (179). Attention to this principle helps instructors move beyond providing disciplinary content. He notes students receive ample content in the university, but too rarely do they learn how to think and communicate as a practitioner in a particular discourse. Through indoctrination, students learn to engage with a subject as an active participant instead of as an outsider briefly peeking in on a subject as a theme for a particular assignment.

The second principle Bartholomae discusses at length here is interference. This term has positive connotations here as it emphasizes disrupting students’ typical perceptions. He claims students tend to approach the writing process as a linear activity, as a sort of a formula. The language instructors use in constructing their assignments can exacerbate this problem since this language often carries different meanings in different disciplinary contexts. The directive to “argue” in a political science course assignment likely carries different implications than it does in an English course. As a result, students tend to retreat to closed and easily defended theses rather than wrestling with the uncertainties of a subject. Instead of closing off subjects, Bartholomae claims that academic writers recognize and engage with the open and situated nature of discourse and knowledge. To help students better understand this, instructors need to make sure that their assignments help students recognize and be comfortable with this as well. Ultimately, Bartholomae claims that only a sequence of assignments that focus on the same topic, allow the instructor to push against students’ conceptions, and otherwise “interfere” with students’ typical ways of writing and thinking will allow students to explore a subject as a subject, to situate themselves in the subject’s discourse, and to have the room to explore the subject.

I tend to agree with Bartholomae’s position that at least part of our duty as writing instructors is to help students find greater academic and professional—even civic and personal—success by providing them the tools needed to effectively and efficiently understand and navigate discourse communities. The scaffolded approach to assignment development he advocates here positions assignments as part of an ongoing investigation into academic discourses (though one could certainly imagine this applying to other types of discourses as well) that link course assignments with the work students will be doing elsewhere and encourage students to see themselves as participants in that discourse.

664 Blog 1: (Re)Interpreting Post-Process and Process

Breuch, Lee-Ann M. Kastman. “Post-Process ‘Pedagogy’: A Philosophical Exercise.” JAC 22.1 (2002): 119-50. Rpt. in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Victor Villanueva. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2003. 97-125. Print.

Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch’s article explores post-process criticisms and argues against the simplistic views of both process and post-process notions to create a more dialogic and effective pedagogy. She begins by exploring some of the key tenets of post-process theory. Much of this resides in challenging the notion that writing processes can be codified and taught as content. This is most apparent in the “rejection of mastery” that post-process theories exhibit by objecting to writing as a thing to study rather than an activity in which students can engage. When the focus is on process as content, an instructor may bring up prewriting in a lecture or discussion and leave it as something for students to engage in on their own rather than making this an explicit and consistent part of classroom practices. Breuch also discusses the views of writing’s public, interpretive, and situated nature that arise from post-process theory; but she rightly notes that these are not specific to post-process theory, that they have established roots in postmodern theories of thought and language.

In short, post-process theory is not anti-process, nor is it trying to alter radically the theoretical underpinnings of composition instruction. However, she recognizes that post-process too readily turns process into a villain. The arguments against mastery, specifically, often miss the intentions (and quite often, the realities) of process pedagogy: that the goal of process is to engage students in an activity and not to provide content to master. Breuch ends her discussion with a turn toward pedagogy, though she claims that the anti-foundational nature of post-process limits her ability to consider specific pedagogies. She does discuss, however, two considerations we can draw from post-process theory. First, we need to consider writing and its processes as actual activities, not just as fodder for a few lectures. Second, we should attempt to emphasize the dialogic nature of communication both in how we help students understand and engage in writing. Her hope, then, is that we consider fully and carefully what we do as teachers.

Breuch’s article offers two key benefits, one somewhat more universal and one more personal. The first comes in her attempts to dispel some myths about post-process theory and to counter some of the problematic views of process pedagogy that some post-process interpretations have. By complicating both notions, Breuch reminds us that seemingly competing theories need not negate each other. Thus, to engage in effective praxis, we need to be critical interpreters and practitioners of theory. The second matter concerns a problem I tend to have as an instructor. I, too, have fallen into the trap of process as content (not that I do not bring in process activities directly into the classroom). Breuch’s article will not only provide some ideas to underwrite the entire trajectory of my course, but this also will provide me with reminders to keep process and dialogue as more central and active parts of the assignments I construct.

Entries for "Teaching College Composition"

My project for this course is to redesign my Composition II course. This course is a general education course and typically consists of sophomores. I have recently acquired the text Writing about Writing—a text that uses issues in writing as the content for a composition course. The content of this text is different than the “social issues” readers I typically use. Because of this, I am rethinking my assignments and my approaches to them. Therefore, my focus in the blog will be on issues related to assignment development and assessment to help me rethink my approaches to assignments.

Pedagogy Article Slideshow

Below is the link to my slideshow. I tried to condense as much as I could, but, you know. . . . My thinking on this is still a little rough, so I would appreciate any feedback.

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View more presentations from nathanserfling

Pedagogical Tool Review: VoiceThread

(First, the link to my VoiceThread.)

VoiceThread, an online interactive slideshow program, offers instructors a new way to conduct discussions that allows for video and audio posts, unlike typical discussion forums that rely almost exclusively on text. And this is a rather simple tool to use. After creating an account, users click the “Create” tab to upload files from a local drive, include files from a media source (VoiceThread gives direct links to other VoiceThreads, Flickr, Facebook, and over 700,000 images from the New York Public Library), insert URLs, and/or create videos using a webcam. Users can also edit how viewers see the slideshow and can edit the publishing options, adding a fair amount of security to the VoiceThread.

Once creators share the VoiceThread, viewers who have VoiceThread accounts can comment on that (or about any) VoiceThread. A viewer simply clicks the “Comment” button and chooses the mode of comment he or she prefers; the principle options include text, audio, or video—the latter two having ten minute limits. Another feature available to viewers commenting via audio or video is Doodle. When recording an audio or video comment, a viewer can draw directly on the slide using the mouse. These doodles will then be visible to anyone who views the VoiceThread’s comments. Finally, once posted, the comments appear as boxes bearing images chosen by the commenters around the sides of the original VoiceThread. As the slides progress, the comments follow in the order they were posted (but the slideshow’s creator can modify this order).

Though VoiceThread has broad educational and non-educational uses, it does offer a number of key affordances for instructors in English studies. As English studies becomes increasingly multimodal, instructors seek out new tools and methods to teach students about critiquing and producing multimodal texts. This presents two key challenges. The first challenge is to align the technologies and multimodal texts with particular goals of English studies (Selber 8; Journet 110-11). The second challenge is to debunk the idea that technology use is simply a skill. Indeed, as Jennifer Sheppard argues, producers of effective multimodal texts must make careful rhetorical considerations of audience, context, purpose, and media (122). This provides instructors with the opportunity to emphasize both critique and production of multimodal texts, challenging theory/practice divides (Sheppard 123; Journet 114; Selber 7; Hocks 644-45).

Several scholars and teachers have introduced pedagogical practices to meet these challenges. Especially germane to VoiceThread, at least for my purposes, is Stuart Selber’s three literacies regarding computers: functional literacy (use), critical literacy (analysis), and rhetorical literacy (production) (24-25). An instructor could put into practice, quite easily, Selber’s various literacies using a tool such as VoiceThread. In a course emphasizing visual rhetoric or multimodal composition, an instructor could upload any text (a video, an image, etc.) into a VoiceThread. Students would then have to engage in functional literacy practices by viewing and commenting on that text. Students would rely on critical literacy to comment on the rhetoric, content, and design features of the text. And students must also consider their own rhetorical practices (albeit in a somewhat limited capacity) in their comments, thereby engaging in rhetorical literacy. One can see, too, how an instructor might incorporate elements of the New London Group’s mulitiliteracies pedagogy in a VoiceThread project (see Cope and Kalantzis 30-36).

VoiceThread’s affordances are not only specific to visual rhetoric or multimodal composition courses. A literature course instructor, for instance, could easily upload a poem (so long as the font size makes for easy viewing), or one of the many thousands of images from the New York Public Library (images of the growth of New York City if one was doing a unit on literature of the metropolis) for the class to analyze. More generally, VoiceThread offers a somewhat tangential but important benefit, especially for asynchronous distance classes. As these classes typically rely on considerable amounts of text, VoiceThread gives its users the opportunities to see and hear those in the class, creating an added sense of connection in courses that might isolate students (see Owens, Hardcastle, and Richardson).

VoiceThread is not without some drawbacks, most of which deal with the limitations of the free version and the cost of the paid versions. The free version limits uploads to 25MB and allows a user only three VoiceThreads on his or her account at a time. If use of VoiceThread were to be more than infrequent, the instructor would need to delete VoiceThreads and all the comments associated with them to create new VoiceThreads. VoiceThread does offer a Pro version with unlimited VoiceThreads and unlimited audio and video commenting, file uploads of up to 100MB, among other features, for $59.95 per year. VoiceThread also offers educational versions for K-12 and higher education. In the higher education category, an instructor can purchase a single instructor/manager account for $99 per year that includes one Pro account and 50 basic accounts. Departmental licenses are $699 for ten Pro accounts and 250 basic accounts, though the site doesn’t specify if this fee is one-time yearly. The limits of the free account and the costs of the other products may be significantly prohibitive depending on planned uses and/or available funding resources. Finally, aside from account concerns, another problem (though a small one) is that users cannot link or embed YouTube videos in a VoiceThread, but a free download of a YouTube downloader remedies this. Otherwise, VoiceThread accepts the majority of common file types.

Ultimately, VoiceThread is an easily accessible tool that, because of its ease of use and flexibility, can contribute to a variety of courses that emphasize and/or encourage a number of modalities in presenting and producing information. However, unless users are willing to pay for greater access, they may be forced to incorporate this minimally, costing time and effort for students and instructors for limited use. A clearly articulated and longer project, though, could counterbalance these limitations; furthermore, if an instructor plans to use this in a number of ways, the $5 monthly expense of a Pro account may be nominal for the affordances of this tool.
 
Works Cited

Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis. “Introduction: Multiliteracies: The Beginning of an Idea.” Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. Ed. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis. London: Routledge, 2000. 3-37. Print.

Hocks, Mary E. “Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments.” CCC 54.4 (2003): 629-56. Print.

Journet, Debra. “Inventing Myself in Multimodality: Encouraging Senior Faculty to Use Digital Media.” Computers and Composition 24 (2007): 107-20. Print.

Owens, Janet, Lesley Ann Hardcastle, and Ben Richardson. “Learning from a Distance: The Experience of Remote Students.” Journal of Distance Education 23.3 (2009): 53-74. Print.

Selber, Stuart A. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2004. Print.

Sheppard, Jennifer. “The Rhetorical Work of Multimedia Production Practices: It’s More Than Just Technical Skill.” Computers and Composition (2009): 122-31. Print.

Wicked Design

Marback, Richard. “Embracing Wicked Problems: The Turn to Design in Composition Studies.” CCC 61.2 (2009): W397-W419. Print.

In this sometimes dense piece, Richard Marback traces the recent turns to design in composition studies brought about by the increasing emphasis on digital technologies and multimodal text production, and he strongly supports this shift. He notes that since the 1990s, critique has hindered students’ ability to have agency in the texts they produce. His call, then, is for composition to move beyond critique and to adopt design as a way to give greater agency to our students in the production of their texts.

But his goals for design are precise: As the title suggests, he wants design to “embrac[e] wicked problems.” These “wicked problems” convey the notion that producing any artifact is a constant tension between previous iterations of that artifact, the designer’s goals, the audience’s potential responses to it, the interrelations of its constituent parts, and the designer’s negotiations of these tensions. Wicked problems, then, are provisional, ambiguous, and not ultimately solvable; designers can only meet the challenges of a particular situation through “an embrace of ambiguities in our responses to each other with and through our artifacts” (W418).

He also traces recent scholarship on the use of design in composition studies, examining the works of Gunther Kress, the New London Group, Richard Buchanan, Diana George, and Mary Hocks (among others). He sees in them some valiant efforts to promote the types of design considerations he advocates, but notes that these efforts tend to fall short of actively and thoroughly espousing the realities of wicked problems in design. They fail, by his accounts, by reducing design and analysis to textual terms, by not fully acknowledging the complexity of design, or by relying too much on the language of critique. He calls on instructors to view design as “a problem of ambiguity and indeterminacy in audience and purpose, a problem of struggling with our abilities to respond to artifacts, with the capacity in our artifacts to respond to us, as well as the problem of our responsibility we have as designers for the abilities of our artifacts to respond and elicit responses from others” (W415). He next provides us with a sample assignment, illustrating how students might consider and engage wicked problems.

Often, maybe too often, recent arguments about the need to incorporate design into composition studies seem to reduce practices to sets of principles that suggest relatively easy solutions or place multimodality in textual terms, neglecting their breadth and depth of appeals and designs. In other circumstances, design or rhetorical terms are invoked as a solution (even an easy solution) to the complexities of multimodal text production. Marback, despite engaging in something he faults others for (suggesting “wicked problems” as a sort of panacea), reminds us of the true complexity of producing effective texts and pushes against the tendency toward simplifying what design entails.

The New Gatekeeper?

Goode, Joanna. “The Digital Identity Divide: How Technology Knowledge Impacts College Students.” New Media and Society 12.3 (2010): 497-513. Print.

The digital divide is a common concept when discussing the role of technology in education. Joanna Goode’s article attempts to dig deeper into the significance of this divide than has previous scholarship. Her concern is that the prevailing discussions about the digital divide center on “deterministic” matters like access and use. In this article, she claims that to more fully understand the digital divide, we must consider sociocultural elements that contribute to the creation of this divide and how the divide affects students and their quest for academic success. She explores how students construct their own “technology identities” through narratives about their relationship with technology. The theoretical framework she applies to her study couches the student narratives in four key beliefs: “beliefs about one’s own technology abilities; beliefs about the importance of technology; beliefs about participation opportunities and constraints that exist; and one’s sense of motivation to learn more about technology” (502). She then highlights three student responses to the study as representative of different technological identities.

Not surprisingly, the student at the lowest end was from an economically disadvantaged area. Her high school lacked good facilities and qualified educators in general, not to mention its lack of technological opportunities. The two students who fell in the middle (fluent but indifferent) and upper (“highly fluent [. . .] and infatuated” [508-09, emphasis in original]) categories came from middle-class families and had ready access to technology at home and in school. Goode then focuses on the consequences for these students. The more adept students used technology efficiently: registering for courses, using various software applications for different classes, even saving money and time by using various online services. For the student at the lower end, the university’s reliance on technology and minimal support proved significant obstacles, limiting her ability to effectively perform activities such as research and registration. She also had limited knowledge of programs such as free home internet access for off-campus students.

Though Goode tries to distance herself from “deterministic” concerns about access and use, she does not fully elaborate on how her notions of technology identity significantly differ from previous work on the digital divide aside from her comments about the direct effects on students’ perceptions of their relationship with technology. However, the reminder her article creates for us as educators is particularly germane, especially for English studies pedagogies relying on new technologies. As educators, we cannot assume our students’ level of technological abilities. At the college level, we may tend to trust that students have the basic competencies needed to function effectively. Goode’s article reminds us of the pitfalls of such an assumption. We need to familiarize ourselves with our students’ technology skills (as we would with their writing abilities). This reiterates the importance of the New London Group’s calls for Overt Instruction and Situated Practice (Cope and Kalantzis 33-34). Students need particular competencies so they can effectively engage in critique and production—and so they can have better chances for academic success.

Work Cited

Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis. “Introduction: Multiliteracies: The Beginning of an Idea.” Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. Ed. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis. London: Routledge, 2000. 3-37. Print.

Written by Me, Designed by Someone Else

Arola, Kristin L. “The Design of Web 2.0: The Rise of the Template, the Fall of Design.” Computers and Composition 27 (2010): 4-14. Print.

Calls for developing student competencies in multimodality to make students more successful as students and professionals are not new. Nor are calls for critical awareness of potential consequences of the use of these different modalities. So in some ways, Kristin L. Arola’s article is a bit old hat. However, her emphasis on the rhetoric of templates in Web 2.0 technologies (specifically in social networking sites) seems a useful addition to issues instructors should consider in their multimodal writing course. By analyzing the predominance of templates in Web 2.0 technologies, she argues that templates have not only reduced users’ ability to determine how others view them but also have strengthened the notion that form and content are separate and insignificant for one another.

She notes this divide is especially troublesome now as rhetoric and composition becomes more focused on instructing students in composing with various technological applications. An irony exists here: on the one hand, we attempt to encourage students to think about how and why they design a text as they do (in addition to content considerations), but on the other hand “Net Generation students, as well as ourselves, are discouraged in Web 2.0 from creating designs” (6). And as we lose this control, we lose certain amounts of individuality on the Internet and opportunities to more fully and rhetorically consider the role of design. She notes this is especially true on social networking sites. Her examples include Facebook and MySpace. She argues through these examples that page layouts and the control (or lack thereof) of what information appears and where it appears suggests an identity dictated by the platform. For example, when people view our Facebook page, they see our image most prominently; but when we view our own pages, we see our News Feed most prominently, suggesting this is perhaps how Facebook designers feel we should view ourselves. She does praise MySpace because it allows users to vary what content appears on the page, but these can only appear in predetermined locations, again establishing patterns of identity not controlled by the user.

However, as Arola claims, this represents an opportunity for instructors in composition and rhetoric. By calling attention to these limiting features, we can teach students about the roles and rhetoric of design: we can rely on a space familiar to our students and encourage them to think in new, critical ways about it. And under Arola’s discussions simmers the idea of empowerment (and, indeed, she uses the term on occasion), yet she does not take this opportunity to explore how this greater awareness of the rhetoric of design can bring us into discussions of power, hierarchy, and personal identity with our students. This may be by design, of course, with the intention of leaving such discussions open to individual instructors, but if we are not to separate form and content, leaving out the discussions of the consequences of form beyond their rhetorical effects seems to do just that.

Infovis and Composing in Web 2.0

Sorapure, Madeleine. “Information Visualization, Web 2.0, and the Teaching of Writing.” Computers and Composition 27 (2010): 59-70. Print.

This article introduced me to a Web 2.0 technology I knew little about: information visualization, or infovis. This technology allows users to upload information (parts of a text, personal information, statistics, etc.) and create various visualizations with that data. Madeleine Sorapure argues that this technology can provide students with critical perspectives of Web 2.0 texts and software by offering instructors opportunities for improving assignments, students’ abilities to analyze software biases, and student competencies in conceiving and creating texts. In short, she claims infovis makes students better producers and more critical consumers of Web 2.0texts.

She begins her work with some basic explanation of Web 2.0, mostly emphasizing that our students are often already creators of Web 2.0 texts but are not critical of these texts, which she also calls for in her use of infovis. She then turns to three common writing assignments—textual analysis, personal reflection, and the persuasive essay—but re-envisions them with infovis. She asks students to upload text, create a word cloud (a type of infovis) from this text, and reflect on their choice of text and methods of manipulating the text. Some students noted greater insight into their texts; others found software failing to account for personality or subtly in language. Her second example of an infovis assignment relied on student use of personal information (credit card purchases, music listening habits, or even photos taken, for example) to create a new way for students to think of themselves. Finally, she used infovis to address broader social concerns, asking her students to search for statistical information on a meaningful social issue and put that information into a visualization that would be meaningful for their audience.

Because this article gives examples of typical writing assignments, the application of infovis seems quite achievable. And although this Web 2.0 technology intrigues me, I feel that Sorapure’s goal of being critical of this new technology slips away from her. She does note that students were aware of the limits of this technology; however, she misses (or takes for granted) some key issues. First, she does not say if her students were freshmen/sophomores, juniors/seniors, or graduate students. The class was “Writing in New Media,” which seems to suggest a course designed for undergraduate students at the junior or senior level or graduate students (at least students with writing and research experience). So the types of research and software manipulation she suggest here may be somewhat taxing for lower-level undergraduate students without extensive instructor intervention, limiting the scope of infovis application. Next, and related to this, she fails to mention the learning curves associated with the software discussed here. Harried teachers who may want to incorporate innovative practices may find the programs too onerous to learn effectively. Finally, she does not mention how much visual rhetoric instruction students needed (or had had previously) to become the critical producers and analyzers of Web 2.0 texts she described at the beginning.

Into the Blogosphere

Gallagher, Jamey. “‘As Y’all Know’: Blog as Bridge.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 37.3 (2010): 286-94. Print.

In this article, Jamey Gallagher argues that writing instructors can use blogs to help students gain greater facility with academic writing. Gallagher extends David Bartholomae’s use of the term “commonplaces” as it appeared in “Inventing the University.” For Gallgher, commonplaces incorporate “style and purpose” (286), and four commonplaces that identify the political blogs he examined are “informal language,” “intertextuality,” “the personal address,” and “the rhetoric of the provisional.” These commonplaces help make blogs “examples of emplaced, agency-granting writing and [. . .] bridges to academic writing” (286).

In his examination of a political blog, Gallagher notes the informality of the language makes the work accessible. But the informality is not the result of carelessness. Rather, the informal language, he argues, is part of a carefully structured attempt to mimic thought processes. This informality is also inviting to students because it deemphasizes grammar and correctness and creates a more inclusive atmosphere. Next Gallagher addresses intertextuality, which refers to the linking that typically occurs in blogs. This represents two fundamental parts of writing that writing instructors often tend to teach: using sources as part of an argument and writing as a social act. In addition, the comments that occur in blogs add another layer of intertextuality and open up possibilities for the development of a discourse community. The personal address is a significant commonplace of the blog as well, one that allows specific development of a persona. This, too, is an inviting aspect of blogs. Readers are encouraged to directly engage with the author and become a part of the conversation (something academic writing can sometimes neglect). Such an emphasis on voice can benefit those writing instructors who actively encourage their students to discover their voices in writing. Finally, Gallagher explores the importance of the rhetoric of the provisional. This emphasizes the act of thinking and responding rather than asserting, allowing for more open-ended consideration. This leads him to conclude that, in good blogs, “[t]hought is valued over the rant. The provisional is valued over the final. Community is valued over individuality. All of these qualities are what good, solid academic writing values as well, and what the worst kind of academic writing fails to value” (291-92).

What I find most compelling about Gallagher’s piece is that the suggestion here is not that blogs are good simply because students can relate to them or because they are new. Instead, the author points to key areas of overlap blogs share with the types of writing institutions often expect of their instructors. And Gallagher points to the faults of blogs as well: they can be belligerent and anarchic, sloppy in their composition and thought. However, I think Gallagher’s piece gives writing instructors cause to further consider incorporating Web 2.0 genres as tools to help students move into academic writing.