teaching manifesto
Main Points
My teaching goals include having students
- understand how texts can be composed for various purposes, audiences, and contexts;
- find their investment in the course topic/theme through whatever means will get them there and to use that engagement to improve their critical thinking skills;
- compose multimodal texts, which helps them understand how we make meaning critically in many modes of communication at once, not just through writing; and
- work with digital technology whenever possible to increase their functional literacies in public, new media spaces.
Manifesto
For a graduate class on multimodal composition that I taught during the fall term of 2006, I had the pleasure of rereading Geoffrey Sirc’s 2002 book English Composition as a Happening. When I originally read this book as a graduate student, I was moved by Sirc’s obvious passion for teaching composition—a passion I felt strongly that I needed to replicate for myself in order to reinvigorate my teaching. The first line of Sirc’s book reads something like: Nobody burns incense in the composition classroom anymore because it’ll mess up the disk drives. As a faculty member, I worried that a Happenings pedagogy—one filled with wow and wonder and a want to write, to make meaning—is a thing that may have been more easily left (or abandoned) to the 60s avant-garde art movement. I’m no hippie or incense-burning comp teacher. Instead, what I take away from Sirc’s manifesto, and what I find is sustainable about a Happenings pedagogy, is that teaching writing is a process of teaching the composition of texts other than those we might typically find in first-year writing classrooms. So, I want students to learn how to learn to compose in a way that engages their critical thinking while saturating them in situated, digital, and multimodal composition practice. Not every student needs to be a socially constructed model of whatever-literacy-means-at-the-moment to those who know nothing about teaching literacies (see, e.g., Schroeder, 2002). Instead, learning to write, to compose, is a bigger task than writing academic papers alone.
The graduate students balked: “How can anyone teach what Sirc proposes? He never outlines what a ‘Happenings pedagogy’ might look like! What about the basic writers who can’t use proper grammar?” Their resistance reminds me that not all is consensual in academia. Nor, sometimes, should it be. Difference of thought offers teachable moments for critical reasoning. The students discovered one example of this after they’d spent an entire 3-hour class period creating a “map” of composition pedagogies on poster board, which we hung on the wall of our classroom. That classroom happened to also be the seminar room for all the graduate classes as well as the only conference room in our building. Within three days of hanging the students Happenings-style map, several faculty members and staff members said they appreciated seeing the students’ work visibly displayed. But one faculty member was unhappy and asked me to remove it. She said the poster was distracting. When I asked to whom it was distracting, she suggested that the map “removed the neutrality of the classroom,” which could make the space uncomfortable for students and faculty members. Despite my protests that neither the classroom nor the institution are ever neutral–and so we should learn to critically examine our assumptions about these spaces–I had to remove the map. In class, the students and I took the map down together and discussed how writing pedagogies are political regardless of whether we make them so. It was a Happenings moment that I could not have planned, but which was one of the most effective teaching moments all semester.
Planning a Happenings teaching-moment, however, is—as the students’ original protests against Sirc reminded me—often difficult to imagine or carry out. Living by a Happenings pedagogy alone can be too much for new teachers, or even experienced teachers, to handle. That same term, I taught an undergraduate class on digital narratives. Technically, the course was called Perspectives on Writing and Rhetoric, and it was akin to an advanced composition class for non-English majors. To supplement a Happenings-style pedagogy, I taught this course using the New London Group’s multiliteracies pedagogy. That theory calls for “overt instruction” (i.e., developing a language for doing), “situated practice” (i.e., the doing/designing), “critical framing” (i.e., making sense of the design using the developed language), and “transformed practice” (i.e., transferring new knowledge to different contexts). Thus, when I ask students to compose multimodal texts, I ask them to analyze others’ texts, create their own usable framework for discussing those texts, compose their own text based on their analytical framework, and then write about what they learned from the process.
In this class, using the multiliteracies pedagogy allowed students the freedom of exploring the genre of video documentaries as a situated composition practice, one that is transferable to other writing/composition processes. Students have to gather research, write a proposal, draft a storyboard (a visual outline), film, and edit their documentaries. When composing a video documentary, students attend to rhetorical, critical, functional and a host of other choices when navigating linguistic, audio, visual, gestural, and spatial modes of communication. The Happenings pedagogy comes into play, along with a structured multimodal framework (see, e.g., Shipka, 2005), at the end of the term when students compose their choice of supporting materials for their documentaries. These supporting materials have to relate to their documentaries but must also engage different audiences, media, and genres relative to their documentaries. We brainstormed textual choices, and the students came up with the obvious (movie trailers, radio ads) and the not-so-obvious (theme parks, clothing lines, storybooks, mock interviews). Their collection of texts, all rhetorically and aesthetically chosen to enhance and/or change the rhetorical situation of the documentary, is akin to Sirc’s Box-Logic assignment, modeled after Duchamp’s boxes (see Sirc, 2004). The key for students is that they have to strategize how to complete their work for these texts, and then describe that process in writing. Throughout the term, I guide them and offer feedback but they are ultimately responsible for the outcomes of their learning.
Having the pedagogical freedom to shift my practices to accommodate and push student learning is what I hope graduate students learn from me as well: Not every pedagogy will suit them. For instance, when I recognized that the undergraduates needed more time to plan and film the documentary assignment than what I had originally scheduled, we had a whole-class discussion about changing the syllabus and then they voted whether to accept the changes. Teaching is always a negotiation. Teaching is also a learned practice, just like writing, and the more they become familiar with the many pedagogies available to them, the more flexibility and wonderful teaching moments (Happenings-style or not) they’ll be able to have with students.
Works that Inspire Me
Cope, Bill, & Kalantzis, Mary. (Eds.) (2000). Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. New York: Routledge.
Shipka, Jody. (2005). A multimodal task-based framework for composing. College Composition and Communication 57(2), 277–306.
Sirc, Geoffrey. (2002). English composition as a Happening. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Sirc, Geoffrey. (2004). Box-logic. In Writing new media, Wysocki, Johnson-Eilola,
Selfe, & Sirc (eds.). Logan: Utah State University Press.
Schroeder, Christopher. (2002). Re-inventing the university: Literacies and legitimacy in the postmodern academy. Logan: Utah State University Press.
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