computers and composition seminar blog

If I understood John's question correctly and if I am not reducing it too simply, the question is: Why focus on multi-modalities and what does it do for composition pedagogy?

I will try my best to make an impassioned plea for what is possible.

On Page 92 of MC: "By working with new technologies in advance of students, teachers not only gain a bit of first-hand experience with new composing modalities, vocabulary, software and hardware, and infrastructural challenges, but--if they open their minds to learning--they can also acquire some empathy with students and, importantly, a sense of humility that will allow them to approach students as fellow-learners, much a Paulo Freire suggests."

By situating ourselves in an environment for which we are unfamiliar, we are breaking down that sense of appellation that plagues our education system--banking--the idea that the teacher has all the answers and that the student is a passive recipient of knowledge. This dynamic is unlikely given the environment that technology situates us within. We are not familiar with this--we have our knowledge of rhetoric and composition to bring to the table--but we must rely more on our students for technology expertise, and we work together to combine the two. They touched on this also on page 36. And if you DO know the technology (talking to Holmes :-), pretend that your don't (97)---your students will respond better if they feel that you must rely on them. Paulo Feire did not call this relationship student/teacher, instead he called it educator/educand to work against a hyperbolic sense of this difference. I will use these labels for the value I feel they represent.

The key, I would argue, is in the environment that technology forces us to build.

Part of this process is in the knowledge pool we build with our students (41). Since the technology is new to (nearly) everyone, the environment forces us to engage our students to establish who is most proficient with technology. So instead of entering the classroom from day one and telling our students what they should know, we are instead going to the students first because we will need them for the answers--like we are supposed to if we value either Problem-posing methods of education or Writing ecology. We are deflating an exaggerated sense of our own importance by reminding ourselves that we play a part, a strong part, but that without the collective working together to share and develop knowledge, we will certainly not succeed as well as we could. This collaboration also speaks to literacy studies, as our students are both sharing the knowledge they bring into the classroom as well as creating a new language, in partnership with the educator, to understand this new digital world of composing and rhetoric and possibility. Furthermore, since technology is prone to complications it also forces us to be positive with our attitudes, which will absolutely be reflected on our students, it is Susan Mcleod's Pygmalian affect forced by the circumstance that technology forces us to deal with.

It is the environment that is created that is the most valuable. And we are social beings, and "writing is an inherently social act" (79). Just imagine, in working with technology in our classroom, we must work together if we are to accomplish anything. Just like in the real world.

And we aren’t really changing our practices that much. There is also a flavor of Cognitivist here, that this pedagogy encourages “written reflection” (33) and that there are clearly confined goals. There is a flavor of expressivist here, to "avoid adding to many constraints" to an assignment (29). There is a flavor of the recursive process of writing here, as the "classroom's primary goal [is] theory revised and realized (30). There is a flavor of the organization elements of writing, from the organization of files either hierarchically or sequentially (69) the rhetorical production itself (52-53).

And I am sure all of you could think of dozens of more examples. The point is that all of these practices came from studying, using and testing our ability to teach alphabetic composition. This new multimodal game, to me, sounds very similar, maybe we are just changing to a more productive location? And who knows what it could become?

And how do we know that this does what we think it does? I feel that the concept affordances are married to the heuristic, and to the evaluative processes they suggest in MC. The educands are allowed to experiment with modality in order to generate meaning (83-98) and they and the educator are involved with the evaluation process every step of the way (99-111). There is no separation between the educator and educand during the process beyond the final grade for the product, which even then, no doubt, will be influenced by the responses our educands offered each other. I am rather fond of that idea...an arena of persuasion every step of the way.

To return to John's question, do we have to be multi-modal to accomplish this? I think the better question is whether we have ways to create this kind of environment without it. I know that personally I have failed at this many times, but luckily just shy of how many times I have succeeded. I continue to try. Maybe multi-modal composition will help my success rate.

Please keep in mind that I have my reservations about this as well. But since the conversation in class is so often critical, I felt positioned to be the voice of encouragement. Please also understand that if I did not, then I would loose my position as the devil's most outspoken advocate. I simply can't have that. I like that position. My favorite part about this position is that it needs the arguments and perspectives of others in order to take form in the first place.