Bloomington

It’s been a coupla days since I blogged because I’ve been trying to post comments on the DMAC blog instead of blogging here. But I need to catch up and felt compelled because, during the morning discussion about the readings, the conversation turned yet again to grading. Sigh. I’ve never seen people get more heated — no matter the location (DMAC, conferences, TA practica, whatever) — when the conversation turns to grading. And discussants (again, *everywhere*) get defensive about grading, believing that *their* method is right. (I’m thinking here of the moment this morning when I ungraciously wagged my finger at Cindy and said that the students who balk at non-graded assignments are exactly the students who NEED non-graded assignments. Oh, Cheryl, what are you doing?!)

But the defensiveness in the grading discussion is warranted. Every single blessed discussant is right. Teachers need to embrace their own methods and, as Cindy says, have NO GUILT about the way they teach (and grade). Which is why I wish we could stop talking about grading. The problem with talking about grading and assessing new media work is that while it is necessary to think about, and should definitely be something that is discussed at DMAC, it’s, frankly, a premature discussion to have right now, this early in the institute.

Here’s what I wish we were talking about: Why are we talking about grading STUDENTS’ new media work when we’ve only just produced, in some cases, OUR FIRST new media pieces? As Marcia just said to me, “We put our teacher hats on” when, in my opinion, we should still be having our student hats on. We’re SO not used to wearing our student hats, tho, and it’s more comfortable to stand by our teacherly training and to objectify our students and their work. It’s a typical, and fine, response for new newmediators (as Bob W. would say), but I hope folks remember to work beyond it.

If it’s not obvious, I’ve been thinking about this issue for a while. It’s not that I want everyone to think MY way, but what I’ve found — and what I tried to unsuccessfully articulate at the Illinois English Articulation conference last month in Champaign-Urbana — is that it seems the conversations we writing teachers have when we start talking about digital media always end up talking about students’ reading and composition practices, with little to no reflection on our OWN reading and composition practices in new media.

Joel implicitly made my point for me when he said that the music in audio pieces is, in sum, an expected genre convention for readers. That is definitely true…. for *some* readers. That is, for readers/listeners of NPR, we have come to expect the musical interludes as part of the meaning-making process. Students who do not listen to NPR (which, in my experience, is most of them) can easily pick out, given in-class discussion prompts, how the music is working.

But, in regards to our own new media compositions,  (1) we don’t yet have a full understanding of how to use music (for instance) in our own digital media compositions… at least not enough to assign ourselves an A grade, in part because (2) we — like new academic writers — can’t yet divorce our personal, emotive reactions of successfully completing a new media piece for the first time from self-editing and understanding what the piece needs during revision to make it rhetorically and aesthetically right for the situation. And so why are we talking about teaching students digital media composition and using rubrics and assigning grades when have much personal work to do in order to understand *what it is that we’re asking our students to do.*

Likely, this sounds like a rant. It is, but it isn’t, and I make this statement looking in the mirror. I’ve been teaching students to compose with digital media since 1998, and every semester that I DON’T compose a digital media piece on my own, I fail to learn something that my students have learned when they compose the assignments (usually open-ended), and so I do not have the teacherly knowledge I need in order to grade them in the most humane and ethical and generous way possible. iow, even with as much experience as I claim to have with reading and composing digital media, there is sooo muuuch I do not know — that none of us English teachers know. It’s a learning process, for sure.

The other thread to this rant is about the disconnect between teaching students to compose digital media and the lack of translation to faculty scholarly production. The smartest thing I’ve heard in this arena in the last year was when Liz Canfield told me that VCU’s English dept changed their tenure guidelines to include digital media production once they realized that they were asking students in their new, collaborative PhD in Media, Art, and Text to produce studio work as part of their degree, but that faculty IN THE SAME PROGRAMS couldn’t get tenure credit for the same work. Bravo to them for realizing the disconnect and for making the change.

I believe that any discussion about asking students to compose multimodally needs to pay attention to asking teachers to compose multimodally as well. One without the other is bad practice and threatens to lead to bad theory (i.e., writing about student production without understanding the processes themselves).

Yes, I am asking for the world, here. And, yet, I do not think it is too much to ask. Why should we ask our students to compose work that we are not allowed to ourselves (within the halls of the institution, I mean)?

As always… a manifesto… As Jamie told me yesterday, “Cheryl, you have balls the size of bowling balls!” lol. Leopard-print bowling balls, to be exact ;)

cheryl.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 8:27 am and is filed under dmac, editing, my life as an academic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.