Week 13: Bias

I related to both Lauren Marshall Bowen's "Resisting Age Bias in Digital Literacy Research" and Adam J. Banks' excerpt from "Digital Griots:  African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age" as an instructor who has taught diverse populations in the past and present.

Before I moved to Ohio to pursue my studies at Bowling Green State University, I taught as an adjunct instructor at Indiana University South Bend and the South Bend and Elkhart campuses of Indiana Institute of Technology (Indiana Tech).  Both schools were diverse in their own ways; IU South Bend particularly catered to non-traditional students.  IU South Bend was an "in-between" school in the South Bend area - it wasn't as competitive (or expensive) as the University of Notre Dame and it wasn't a community college like Ivy Tech.  Because of this, the university brought in many older adults that were looking to pursue their education later in life.  It wasn't unusual for me to have several students in my classes that were the same age as my parents (or older).

Indiana Tech had a (somewhat) different demographic.  The school offered classes that were five weeks long and ran in the evenings so as to be accessible to those with full-time jobs and/or family responsibilities.  The school was very small and non-traditional and was much more affordable than a typical university.  The majority of the students in my classes were African American, blue collar workers with families to care for and tough jobs that exhausted them mentally and physically.

I was thinking of these teaching experiences as I was going through the readings for this week.  Most of my non-traditional students at IU South Bend did not have the same computer capabilities as my college-aged students, and I often struggled with how to reconcile helping the older students while also helping the college-aged students expand on their "advanced" computer knowledge.  While Bowen focuses on a discussion of the elderly in her article, I think her main points apply to my teaching experiences, as well.  As Bowen states, "It is a mistake to identify elders [or older adults] who do not use Web 2.0 technologies, or at least not in expected or conventional ways, as somehow failing or digitally illiterate.  Even online activity that by now seems mundane, such as writing an email or sharing photos, not only counts as digital literacy practice but can also teach us about literate practices that extend beyond youth-centered ideologies" (588).  This is a point that I could have used in my classroom setting at IU South Bend; just because an older individual doesn't use/understand the "youth-centered" technologies of modern society (ex. social media apps) doesn't mean that the knowledge they do possess is useless or obsolete.  Young people have as much (or more) to learn from older generations as older adults do from youth.

Similarly, Banks' article helped me to see the importance in valuing a person's cultural dialect while also teaching them how to write effectively.  I was especially interested in the following statement:  "At this moment...anyone still attempting to argue that Ebonics is a problem for black students or that it is somehow connected to a lack of intelligence or lack of desire to achieve is about as useful as a Betamax video cassette player, and it's time for those folks to be retired" (15).  At Indiana Tech, I struggled with how to value the rich cultural background present in this dialect with my African American students while also fulfilling my duties as a composition instructor (to teach proper "Standard Written English").  Giving value to a student's cultural background is so important, but it can also conflict with the goals of a particular course.  This is something I still haven't completely sorted out, but I do think both a student's background and the goals of a class can converge in a way that promotes learning and growth for both the student and the instructor.

It's great that we live in a time where diversity is celebrated!  Image credit:  annenberglab.com

Week 12: Challenges

"Certainly, technology has been an impetus for constant change, and in the context of online writing pedagogies, this change has impacted not only the spaces in which we teach writing as process but also the increasingly diverse students we serve...What we teach in the writing classroom, both hybrid and fully online, has remained unchanged:  we teach alphabetic writing meant to be produced and consumed on an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper, accessed onscreen or in-hand" (Blair 472). 

This quote seems to sum up many of the conversations that have been taking place in my coursework thus far in the Rhetoric & Writing program - technology is constantly growing and expanding and changing the way we complete tasks, but academic work doesn't seem to reflect the changes taking place.  This question keeps popping up in every one of my courses:  Why does alphabetic text continue to be the preferred modality when so many more composing modalities exist?  Why do schools/teachers avoid multimodal composing in favor of the written text?  Where is the disconnect?

This is where I found the Kristine L. Blair chapter, "Teaching Multimodal Assignments in OWI Contexts," to be particularly interesting.  The challenges to multimodal composing that she presents are very real in the university setting.  Some barriers she mentions include "the presumption that writing remains a 'text-based' process," "limited/inconsistent access to digital composing tools," and "the lack of faculty training" (474).  I've seen these challenges and more step in and keep instructors from encouraging multimodal composing in the classroom and I've experienced some of them myself. 

Recently, our ENG 6020 Comp Instructor's Workshop course required us to create a "lighting talk" (a quick presentation on a specific writing convention) PowerPoint or Prezi complete with a script and sound recordings.  When this assignment was announced in our class, chaos ensued.  In Blair's excerpt, she mentions that the General Studies Writing director stated that her graduate student instructors were more likely to incorporate multimodal composing into their curriculum than their faculty counterparts, probably due to graduate students' "recent training and often generational status as millennials" (472).  However, this wasn't the trend I saw in my ENG 6020 class that day.  My classmates (and me, to an extent) were terrified about this assignment because we had little experience with multimodal composing as students in the classroom setting.  If we had such little experience with multimodal composing, how were we expected to teach it and use it in our classroom?

Another challenge I've experienced is the access to certain apps and programs that can be necessary for multimodal composing.  I've been wanting to work on my webtext review assignment for ENG 7280 outside of class, but without the Adobe Dreamweaver software on my home computer, this is an impossible task.  I was able to recently download a free trial of the software on my computer and work on the project that way, which is helpful for students who may commute to campus or who have work/family responsibilities outside of school.  This challenge and those previously discussed are barriers that consistently get in the way of truly incorporating multimodality into the writing classroom, and are challenges I've experienced firsthand as a student and as an instructor. 

The other readings for this week point to digital composing as a way for students to learn more effectively (as with using blogs for peer review with EFL students), complete assignments more efficiently (and creatively), and "reduce costs, allow students to self pace through courses, and even improve retention" as evident through the discussion of hybrid courses (Warnock 13). 

Despite everyone in my ENG 6020 class being graduate students, I think we all struggled a bit to create the multimodal lesson plan.  Here's a bit of the alphabetic lesson plan that I posted alongside the multimodal presentation on Canvas.

We were required to include a script of the audio so the presentation would be ADA compliant.

The background images were a bit basic in my presentation, was I was proud of how my first multimodal lesson plan turned out!

Week 11: Assessment

I really enjoyed reading the Kara Poe Alexander excerpt, "More About Reading, Responding, and Revising:  The Three Rs of Peer Review and Revision."  As I've mentioned in previous posts (and probably talk about way too much), I've consistently had my graduate school thesis project on my mind throughout the course of our ENG 7280 class and I've been wondering how that project fits into multimodal composing.  Poe Alexander helps shed some light on that with her discussion of various multimodal projects and how they can move beyond just using technologies like audio and video but can be projects like comic strips and posters and can involve any medium imaginable.

I definitely related to her discussion of the revision process with multimodal composing.  During the year I worked on my thesis project in graduate school, I sent several drafts to my committee to have it reviewed and to get feedback for revisions.  However, revision for my project wasn't as easy as changing a few things around in a Word document; I had to start over with a new page.  The pictures, photographs, words, book excerpts, diagrams, etc. were glued down to the page and I also used drawings, lyrics, and paint, aspects of the page that couldn't just be gotten rid of or removed in the revision process without starting over with that page.  As Poe Alexander notes, "With multimodal texts, then, peer review and revision may be complicated by both the range of genres available to student authors and the materiality of texts.  Because of this additional complexity, teachers and students will need to plan ahead about how both to present texts to others and then revise texts after studio review sessions" (113).  This aspect of "peer review" wasn't only an issue with my thesis project, but I think it also plays into the studio review sessions we do in ENG 7280.  We are creating projects that require more time and effort than an alphabetic text and, therefore, the revision process is more involved and time-consuming.  I definitely think it is beneficial to create a "map" or a storyboard of a multimodal project before working on it; this way, classmates and instructors have a chance to look at it and give feedback and suggestions before the project is complete and easy revision becomes an impossibility.

Here's a few excerpts from my thesis:

I think it's also worth noting that the assessment of my thesis involved me creating a 15-page context essay to accompany my narrative collage project.  I think this says something interesting about multimodal composing at my previous institution - perhaps a multimodal project on its own isn't "academic" enough to stand alone without an alphabetic component?

In Sonya C. Borton and Brian Huot's "Responding and Assessing," they discuss personal assessment along with peer review.  They write, "Assessment is an important component of learning to compose with rhetorical effectiveness.  When we help students learn to assess their own compositions and the compositions - the texts - that others create, we are teaching them valuable decision-making skills they can use when producing their own texts" (99).  I think this is especially important for me in our ENG 7280 class.  I came into this class with very little technological experience outside of using my iPhone and social media and working with Microsoft Office.  With our webtext review project, I had no previous knowledge of website building, coding, or Adobe Dreamweaver.  Doing the in-class studio reviews helps me to see what my classmates are doing (especially those who may have more experience with Dreamweaver than me) and apply what I see to my own work.  I'm constantly learning from others in our class, and the studio review days are a great way for me to learn how to implement new things into my projects and to learn to use the technology better.  It is also a time for me to seriously assess my own work.  I like the opportunity to have conversations with my instructor and my classmate so as to get real feedback on my work.  How can I make this better?  How can I use this technology more efficiently?

Week 10: A New Generation

Much of what I've been reading lately seems to stress the importance of valuing young people and the contributions, creative ideas, and wisdom they can bring to society (my book for the webtext review assignment focuses on this).  Brooks, Lindgren, and Warner seem to emphasize this point in their essay "Tackling a Fundamental Problem:  Using Digital Labs to Build Smarter Computing Cultures."  The authors discuss the fields of rhetoric and digital humanities and how students need to be learning how these two specializations intersect early on in their academic careers.  Brooks, Lindgren, and Warner write, "If we are not active in fostering a rich and diverse culture of procedural rhetoricians or introducing students to the expansive possibilities and unexpected practicality of [digital humanities], we see these two specializations within each field remaining specializations, rather than the fundamental way in which the next generation does its work" (225).  This point is made clear in our ENG 7280 course; technology is changing and this generation of young people is more intertwined with technology than ever before.  If students aren't taught the ways in which rhetoric and composition and multimodality intersect from the beginning of their school experiences, they are going to grow up using technology mostly outside the classroom and alphabetic texts inside the classroom (as is the case in most modern classrooms).   

The point of this article, I believe, it to show how important it is for instructors to teach young students how digital humanities and multimodal composing can enhance the educational experience in every classroom.  As Selfe described in an article we read earlier in the semester, it's not either/or, but rather and/both.  In modern society, rhetoric and composition shouldn't exist without each other.  They should be used together to allow students to create products that will help prepare them for a future where technology is growing and is used in all aspects of everyday life.  

This concept can also be seen in Bjork and Schwartz's "Writing in the Wild:  A Paradigm for Mobile Composition."  The essay starts off by discussing Geoffrey Sirc and his discussion of the composition classroom.  Bjork and Schwartz write, "By bringing into the classroom atmospheric objects (e.g. candles) as well as new objects of study (e.g. rap music), Sirc hopes to foster new habits of thought and enliven student writing" (223).  I think the goal of multimodal composing is the same; the ultimate goal in allowing students to complete assignments utilizing different forms and technologies is a way to "foster new habits of thought and enliven student writing."  Young people are the future and bringing these "new objects of study" into the classroom along with assignments that allow for creativity and free thinking will create citizens who are better at working effectively and efficiently. 

Bjork and Schwartz's proposition about mobile composing is an interesting one, and an idea that I have little experience with.  The authors state, "We propose a paradigm for mobile composition in which students visit places of rhetorical activity (e.g. city parks, waiting rooms, shopping malls) and research, write, and (ideally) publish on location.  By publish, we mean transmit their writing to their target audience" (224).  This model suggests that allowing students to compose in this way will "help them achieve insight into the relationship between discourse and place" (224).  I think this could be a useful practice for students and young people that may know about specific discourses and discourse communities, but may have little experience with these people and places outside of the classroom setting.  I think allowing for this "writing in the wild" will help students to see composition with "real-world application" and will help prepare them for adulthood, a career, and beyond.  It seems obvious to me that researching and writing about a hospital waiting room would be more fruitful if a student got to sit, observe, and experience the atmosphere first-hand.  Perhaps "going wireless" could be something for me to implement in future classes.

I often write poetry outside in nature, but I rarely work on schoolwork anywhere but in my office or my living room.  My father is a pilot and I once had to interview someone for career day, so I visited the airport, interviewed him, and wrote my essay for class.  I wonder if this is the kind of "writing in the wild" and "mobile composing" that Bjork and Schwarz are talking about in their article?

 

Week 9: Design

I've never put much thought into the design aspect of social media and blogging.  I'm a person that often struggles to get technology to cooperate with me, so the thought of designing an entire social media page or blog on my own (without any templates) is intimidating (and possibly a bit terrifying). 

As an early high school student, I used social media platforms like Xanga and MySpace.  As far as I can remember, both could be customized, but only by choosing a template with pre-set color schemes and fonts.  I remember that Xanga allowed for a song to be connected with each post while MySpace allowed users to choose a background photo or design, but the ability to customize these pages was limited.  I never had a problem with this and I never really thought about web design as something limited until I read Kristin L. Arola's article, "The Design of Web 2.0:  The Rise of the Template, the Fall of Design."  The article certainly got me thinking:  What are we losing by allowing templates to take over?  What can we learn or what can we teach through design?

As with Arola, I also consider myself to be "technologically stubborn" (4).  However, she also describes her feelings after she learned how to compose using Photoshop and HTML:  "I felt powerful creating my own designs, and for the first time ever I felt technologically literate" (4).  This is something I still don't think I've grasped.  Under Arola's definition, I am part of the "Net Generation," a student born between 1982 and 2000 (5).  Despite this, I've never seen myself as truly "technologically literate" and I try to simplify tasks that involve technology as much as possible.  I recognize that there is one major problem with this mindset - in avoiding and simplifying technology, I'm contributing to my lack of knowledge and understanding on the topic.  I think that Arola is right in saying that really experimenting with and learning design helps us become more technologically literate for ourselves and for the students we teach on a daily basis.

If something goes wrong with the computer in my classroom, I often turn to my students and ask them for help.  I think this is because I see them as more technologically literate than I am, even though we are all part of the same "Net Generation."  Arola talks about her role as an instructor and states that another benefit to learning design is clear when it comes to our students and the classroom experience.  She writes the following about learning new design capabilities:  "If I was to do any service to my web design students, I needed to learn (X)HTML and CSS" (4).  This translates to my classroom experience, as well.  Using technology is paramount to a student's success in college; if they see me simplifying and avoiding technology, perhaps they too will pick up on this and will become "technologically stubborn."

Design also contributes to an understanding of rhetorical strategy.  When discussing multimodal composing and assignments created with the use of technology, we as instructors are always wanting to know why students chose a specific program or platform (like Instagram, video, audio, etc.) to create their project as opposed to another.  Getting students to understand their own decision-making processes and rhetorical strategies helps them better convey their messages and communicate with their chosen audience.  Templates don't leave much room for student to consider rhetorical strategies, so design certainly contributes to a student's overall understanding of carefully choosing colors, fonts, and images to fully and efficiently communicate their message in the best way possible. 

I like the analogy Arola mentions when she writes, "Just because I can drive a car doesn't mean I can fix one" (5).  I use social media on a daily basis, but I wouldn't know the first thing about designing my page without the use of a template.  I'm hoping my experiences with Adobe Dreamweaver and the webtext design project will help me learn more about this process as a whole.

This is a screenshot of my photography website.  Since I had no previous knowledge of web design, I used a Wix template to create this website.  The layout, font, and colors were chosen for me, but I had some freedom in rearranging the order of the pages and the way images and text appeared on each page.  The web address is also long and clunky:  klafolle.wix.com/lsphotography.

Week 7: Social Experiences/Photo Manipulation

The first thing Alexander and Rhodes bring up in Chapter 3 of On Multimodality:  New Media in Composition Studies is the popularity of media in the modern world that allows for audience participation.  Alexander and Rhodes write, "One of the key rhetorical affordances of new media in general is the capacity for active writerly participation in complex public spheres" (105).  Everything today seems to be a social activity.  It used to be that college students could take advantage of Facebook and keep up with their friends from high school, post updates about their college experience, and catch up with family members, but social media has exploded to include people of all ages (young children, students, adults, seniors, etc.) in a number of different formats. 

Facebook is still available and is widely used, but we now have other social media outlets available like Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and more.  Blogs and vlogs make it easy for writers and video makers to get their work out in the open for others to view, critique, enjoy, comment on, etc.  Writing and sharing multimodal projects is now such a social experience; we can see what other people are writing and creating and can make our own interpretations, perceptions, and feelings about the particular piece.  Through the use of these apps and the Internet, we can then let the original creator of the post or video or article know how we felt about the finished product.

An example of this social process:
I was going to go with some members of my cohort to see feminist writer and professor Roxane Gay speak at the University of Michigan last week in Ann Arbor.  We all made plans to meet up and plans for travel via technology.  It was also through technology that we found out the event was canceled (on the University of Michigan website).  We then used Twitter to see if Roxane Gay had written any posts about canceling her reading.  She had, and through this, we were able to find out she was sick and she even provided the nature of her ailment (a throat infection).  We were also able to tag her in a tweet that expressed sadness about the canceled event.  She then tweeted us back to let us know she would reschedule. 

Since we couldn't see Roxane Gay, we went to the Toledo Museum of Art.

New media allows for "active writerly participation."  We are able to communicate with people we never would have been able to without the use of technology.  We are able to read the posts of people in other countries.  We are able to communicate and talk with people across the world quickly and efficiently.

This concept is carried throughout the rest of the Alexander and Rhodes text, but I especially appreciated their discussion about photo manipulation.  As an amateur photographer, I have an interest in taking my own photos and viewing the work of other photographers and artists.  I found the section in Chapter 3 about the "situationist spectacle" and the photos that followed as examples to be very interesting.  The photos are wonderful tools to get students thinking and analyzing in new ways; the photos put faces of one gender on bodies of another gender.  The tensions that result are interesting, as the text suggests; some viewers find the photo manipulations funny and some find them disturbing.  Either way, the photos contribute to a different way of thinking about people, about gender, and about using media to create tensions and new meaning.  As Alexander and Rhodes mention about the photos of world leaders kissing each other mentioned previously in the chapter, "the pictures provide ample opportunity not only for shock but surely also for critique and analysis" (110).

Getting people to think about images in these new and exciting ways was the aim of the Dada and Surrealist movements, as I've discussed in previous posts.  I always find myself bringing up some of these works of art, images, and photographs in my classroom as ways to get students thinking critically about what they see, read, and experience.  Since we have a visual analysis unit coming up in the GSW course I teach, these images could be helpful to bring in as tools to get students to offer critique and analysis.

As Alexander and Rhodes write, "Photo manipulation becomes more than invention, a step toward the composed text, but a form of communication in its own right - one that allows us (and our students) to intervene in important and pressing public discussions" (109).

This popular painting, The Treachery of Images by Rene Magritte, is a favorite of mine to share with my classes.  The image is of a pipe, but the text says "this is not a pipe."  If it's not a pipe, then what is the meaning of the painting?  Photo source:  wikiart.org

 

This work of art, called Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, is a social commentary surrounding the world of art in 1917 when the piece was created.  I also enjoy showing this to my students and asking them to analyze the image.  Photo source:  tate.org.uk 

Week 6: Experimenting with Alternatives

I very much enjoyed the introduction to Jody Shipka's "Toward a Composition Made Whole."  She discusses her experience presenting a "Writing in Many Modes" workshop to a group "that catered to students who favored creative, hands-on approaches to instruction and were open to diverse kinds of learning experiences" (1).  I would place myself in a similar category in that I too favor "creative, hands-on approaches to instruction" and learning.  Shipka discusses the writing project she presented at the workshop that was completed by a student who wrote the words on a  pair of ballet shoes.  What she discusses following her presentation of this project seems to be a typical response to multimodal composing.  A man in the audience asked, "'I have a question.  So where did she put her footnotes?  On a shirt?'" (2).  Shipka goes on to comment, "Despite being phrased as a question, his tone, facial expression, and body language suggested this was not a genuine question or attempt at a clever pun so much as his way of signaling his discomfort with the kinds of texts I was proposing students might produce" (2, emphasis added).  I think the key here is discomfort.  

I admit that I too experience a bit of discomfort when I think of completing assignments with the use of some multimodal forms (mostly involving the use of some piece of technology that is foreign to me, like DreamWeaver).  However, I do have experience with other forms of multimodal composing and I have been able to create projects and assignments for classes as an undergraduate and graduate student utilizing multimodality that have communicated my goal better than any written assignment could have. 

As I stated before, my thesis project for graduate school was very nontraditional.  I wasn't in an MFA program; I was in an MA program where the focus was general English.  However, the program offered two tracks - creative writing and literature - and I chose to pursue the creative writing concentration (I had also minored in creative writing as an undergraduate).  The creative writing professors in the English department at my small school knew me and my interests well.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I was able to complete my graduate thesis as a creative writing project, but it wasn't poetry or fiction.  What resulted was a hybrid of poetry, prose, art, photography, and more - a project I refer to as a narrative collage, a story told through the use of text and image.

Dr. Kelcey Ervick, my thesis committee chair, taught a class on narrative collage that I took as an undergrad.  She understood the importance of multimodal composing like Shipka discusses in her article.  My project told the story of a young girl caring for her younger brother and I don't think the story could have been adequately told through text alone.  The anatomical images and diagrams, the drawings and paintings, and the original photographs I used contributed to a sense of pathos that I couldn't have accomplished otherwise.  I'm thankful for Dr. Ervick and her willingness to let me take on this project as an MA student; this experience has allowed me to see the true value in multimodal composing and the stories it can tell.

However, I think there was a sense of "discomfort" among the rest of my committee and the department as a whole since I was required to turn in a lengthy context essay with my project.  I think this is what Shipka is talking about when she discusses her workshop experience; while so many modes of composition exist, there is still a tendency to value the alphabetic text and forget that there are so many other approaches available to students.

This concept of acceptance applies not only to us as students, but as instructors of composition.  Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes discuss this in On Multimodality when they quote DeVoss and colleagues:  "English-composition teachers and programs must be willing to address an increasingly broad range of literacies - emerging, competing, and fading - if they want their instructions to remain relevant to students' changing communication needs and experiences within the contemporary cultural ecology" (35).  I would love to support a student's creative endeavors the way I was supported in graduate school. 

If a student has the "courage to experiment with alternatives," we as instructors should help to support and encourage them (Shipka 4).

A multimodal project I created as an undergraduate student titled Baby.  The assignment was intended to be multimodal and this project showcased the "heart" and personality of my younger brother.  

This multimodal collage project I created was published in the Spring 2015 edition of Harbinger Asylum (along with two pieces from my graduate thesis and another original collage).  This collage includes acrylic paint on canvas with Harter's images, paper, and quotations from a Stephen King short story called "Everything's Eventual."  I called it Maybe the Cleaners.

This multimodal collage is forthcoming from Plath Profiles:  An Interdisciplinary Journal for Sylvia Plath Studies.  I created it after my favorite poet, Sylvia Plath, and it includes acrylic paint on multi-media paper, Harter's images, and quotes from Plath's collection of letters, Letter's Home.  I called this piece Relentless Cage.