Teaching Philosophy
My favorite book in rhetoric and composition studies is Geoffrey Sirc’s (2002) English Composition as a Happening. In that text, he suggested that composition should be more about what students need and want to write about, and what they have available to them to write about, than the stark, themed essays they are forced to compose within the confines of academic walls. Sirc argued for teachers to “complicate the distinction between art and life” as the Happenings artists did with their of-the-moment, of-the-material performances (p. 5). Composition studies has been, in its own way, paying attention to the thin line between writing and art since the 60s—through Macrorie, Elbow, and other expressivists, and, more recently, through computers-and-compositionists’ work in visual rhetoric, and, most recently, multimodalists such as myself.
When I originally read Sirc’s book as a graduate student, I was moved by his obvious passion for teaching composition—a passion I felt I needed to replicate in order to invigorate my teaching. I want students to feel comfortable taking risks in my class, to compose with multiple media (not just writing, but also writing), and to wow each other and myself through production of rhetorically sophisticated texts they never thought they would or could produce in an English class. It is a happening where students have a great deal of control, but it’s not all wow and wonder and fun, although that’s a big part of why I teach the way I do.
The first line of Sirc’s book—“I suppose the reason none of us burn incense in our writing classes any more is because of the disk drives” (p. 1)—always makes me laugh because I know the history of digital writing studies has not always been an easy one. To me, Sirc’s line encapsulates the multiple, conflicting pedagogies I use in my writing classes, from expressive to critical and technological all the way. In a class like English 402: Teaching Composition, I have taught graduate students to read all the pedagogical approaches out there, reconcile the differences if they can, take what’s useful, and make it their own.
So, although it may seem antithetical at first glance, my teaching philosophy is a happening infused with a socio-epistemic critical lens (Sirc+Berlin, if you will). I think Sirc would approve despite his criticism of composition’s epistemic turn and its formation of, in his words, “a compositional canon” where material restraints—that is, what we can and should be producing in writing classes and writing scholarship—are born (p. 7–8). I don’t think that a happenings pedagogy is focused solely on “liberating students from the shackles of a corrupt society” (Berlin, 2008, p. 127). It was Sirc’s goal to examine and disrupt the space and materials of composition studies after its epistemic turn, and it is one of my pedagogical goals to examine the material, rhetorical conditions in which we compose, while also asking students to produce texts that break out of the traditional material retraints.
In the class I’ve been teaching the longest—an advanced writing class that emphasizes designing multimedia texts (i.e., named Revisions, Perspectives, and Multimodal Composition at the three schools I’ve taught)—my goals always include having students embrace their compositions as both rhetorical and aesthetic texts. At the end of each semester, students indicate their raised awareness of critical and rhetorical (as well as technological) literacies—exhibited in portfolio reflections, in-class feedback to the instructor, and narrative course evaluations as well as in the portfolio of work students submitted. But students have also indicated in their numeric and narrative evaluations that, despite my obvious enthusiasm for the course material, the syllabus lacked organization and focus. Ahem.
In my first three years on the tenure-track, this was not an unusual critique for my teaching, and students don’t always mean it negatively. One student who electively took multiple classes from me referred to my teaching style (with a smile) as “Controlled Chaos,” which I know does not sound appropriate in the rhetorical situation of a tenure application but it aptly describes my Happenings pedagogy, which I have learned to refine so that class sessions are not so chaotic as they once were. I have worked hard to maintain what students used to perceive as chaos (and which I see as academic freedom and an ability to make students choose their assignments and take control of their own learning), and channel that teaching-and-learning style into what they recognize as purposeful, if somewhat spontaneous, series of events—events that could be read in the same fashion as Rosenblatt’s (1994) text-turned-poem events.
What I find sustainable in a Happenings pedagogy is a focus on teaching-as-process as much as learning-as-process and writing-as-process. Because I want students to compose texts other than those typically found in first-year and other writing classrooms, I need to teach in a way so that students can re-learn how to compose in media that is new to them-as-composers using modes of communication that are new to them-as-composers. (In other words, while students are often excellent consumers of digital media, they often have little to no experience producing such texts.) I tell students in classes like this: “Composing a new media text is like learning to write for the first time. And it is hard.” I spend the first day(s) convincing students that a course titled Multimodal Composition, in which they’re going to compose a piece of digital media scholarship for publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly publication, should be taught in an English requirement. In that talk, I don’t usually refer to the theoretical support for this work, such as the New London Group’s Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000), which 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). But that foundation is clearly evident in how I introduce students to the idea that none of us communicate only through writing and that written text itself is multimodal in that it carries visual, spatial, and sonic properties every time we type a new letter-character on the screen.
Sometimes, students initially resist a Happenings pedagogy. Their resistance reminds me that not all is consensual in academia. Nor should it be. Difference of thought can engender teaching moments that allow us to reflect on the critical, material, and ideological issues behind why we’re learning to compose with multiple media. Teaching modes of communication that students have never “written in” before requires them to rethink their basic literacies. This rethinking must occur before instructors and students can build on critical, rhetorical, and functional literacies (Selber, 2004). That is not to say that writing instructors need to limit how they define basic literacies as only surface-level features of writing, such as traditional grammars, syntax, punctuation, and so on; instead, basic literacies might be remediated for multimodal composition to include visual, aural, and database grammars as one set of examples (see Ball & Moeller, 2007, for an extended discussion of new media literacies).
This move from basic literacies in linguistic modes of communication (i.e., “old media”) to basic literacies in multimodal communication (i.e., “new media”) is the same one made by Jay David Botler and Richard Grusin’s Remediation (2000), in which they offered ways of conceptualizing what was happening in the digital, textual world with what had come before and would come after—remixed, recontextualized, remediated (which doesn’t mean remedial, but re-media‘d). Bolter and Grusin defined the terms; now we teachers continue to define its implications in praxis, especially since the accessibility of new media production on home computers makes producing such texts look easier and easier even as the multiplicity of media, modes, and genres in which these texts can be made makes them all the more difficult for readers (and students) to parse.
As an example of what I mean about rethinking basic literacies in terms of new media composition, here’s a scene: A graduate student in my multimodal composition pedagogy course produced a video argument in which he was filmed walking along a railroad track, discussing (to his audience) whether composition studies’ needed to derail itself in order to appreciate multimodality. He then stopped (in his tracks, lol), picked up a fist-sized rock, showed it to the camera, and asked, “How do I show visual punctuation? Is this a period?” (Watkins, 2008, mccloud.mov, 5:43–5:58). For a student who admittedly had never read composition theory before that class nor used iMovie before producing this film, the basic immediacy of his question is striking. What does constitute a period in the medium of video? Without asking students (or teachers) to become experts in art, sound design, cinematography, and so on, how can we teach analysis and composition of new media texts that blend modes of communication, media, and also genres? New media texts often blur the lines between these compositional “tools,” which means that teachers need to break down the hypermediacy of new media without having the course syllabus turn formulaic around discussions of separate modes, media, and genres.
Having learned from my mistakes (see Ball, Fenn, & Scoffield) when I used to ask students to discuss modes, media, and genres separately, I focus instead now on audience, purpose, and context (duh) in whatever modes, media, and genres are required for the rhetorical situation of a piece of digital scholarship. Now, 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. Each class session, taught in 3-hour blocks similar to a studio course in the art department, facilitates a combination of lecturing, guiding, discussion (which often leads us to shift focus or change directions, depending on students’ needs and interests), and hands-on practice of our theoretical work. Having the flexibility to shift my pedagogies to accommodate and push student learning is a goal I hope students take away from my classroom. Teaching and learning, like life, is never set, is always a negotiation, and requires practice—just like the writing process itself.
Works that Inspire Me
Berlin, James. (2008). Rhetoric and ideology in the writing class. In T.R. Johnson (Ed.) Teaching composition. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s Press.
Bolter, Jay David, & Grusin, Richard. (2000). Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cope, Bill, & Kalantzis, Mary. (Eds.) (2000). Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures. New York: Routledge.
Selber, Stuart. Multiliteracies for a digital age. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Sirc, Geoffrey. (2002). English composition as a Happening. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Rosenblatt, Louise. (1994). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Watkins, Robert. (2008). Words are the ultimate abstraction. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 12(3). http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/12.3/topoi/watkins/index.html