My interest in composition has its origin in my interest in my own individual future. That is, this project stems from a need and desire to make meaning of my own pedagogical philosophies with the mind that I intend to spend my life teaching writing as both a source of income, as well as a means to do something meaningful and important with my life: coaching young college students in a field of critical inquiry and meaning-making. More simply stated: I have a desire to help students fulfill their potential as creators and consumers of meaning in Academia and beyond. The following is a study of preexisting debate on the future of literacy pedagogy, which questions how the world has changed in light of technological advances and constantly colliding cultures, and observations I have personally made of current teaching practices aimed at building my own lesson plans for the Introduction to Composition classroom. That makes this a far from ambitious project in the big picture, but a necessary one for me, and one that hopfully others can use to fuel their own debates between theory and practice.
What I am seeing take shape from my research puts a large focus on the New London group, as they seem to be a well-organized group asking all the right questions. Thus, my project takes shape around their ideas in many ways. Conceptually, the paper I am creating starts with the ideas coming out of poststructuralism and follows those ideas into the New London Group. After exploring their theories, my study follows the most recent debates and ideas in the field through recent discussions in Computers and Composition and professional blogs. The study concludes with my own observations and assesments of assignments and syllabi from Composition courses I have observed in my time at the Kutztown University Writing Center. Ultimately, I hope to be able to suggest a set of lesson plans for my own Composition courses.
To give an example of what I am talking about--I have observed quite a few students working on an assignment that calls for them to analyze and assess the rhetoric of magazine advertisements for various popular products. The students must interpret textual and visual rhetoric in these ads and discuss the implications of this rhetoric in a social context. This relates to the New Lond Group's ideas on the Design elements of linguistic, visual, spatial, and gestural design. Students are therefore challenged with digesting multimodal media and using critical thinking skills to assess the negative or positive social implications. Of course, students must then interpret their findings for the reading audience of thier paper, honing their own meaning-making skills. This takes students a step beyond what could be considered traditional analysis of pure text. This is not to say that textual analysis is outdated--far from it. These same courses that call for analysis of multimodal design elements also include straight-up literary analysis. If anything, working on multimodal analysis helps students to look that much deeper into textual analysis and take it beyond words on a page, perhaps creating an ability to read the social contexts of writers whom might otherwise be though of as simply "dead writers that write good old stories."
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3 comments:
I've noticed that it's kind of 'standard-practice' in college classes (at least within psychology, english, philosophy all the girly non-science fields) to exame pop-culture advertisements. It's hard for me to say if I think this is a good or bad thing.
On one hand, you're (hopefully) teaching students to think about the bombardment of advertisments they encounter each day. This is definately a good lesson and can lead to more intelligent consumers.
However, you're also fighting an uphill battle. Big corporations do not want intelligent consumers. As such, much of the advertisements produced by these corporations rely on brand imprinting and stereotyping (e.g. "Opera and Bona have a cool new red ipod so that means I'll be cool if I get one"). So, if you're trying to teach a student to think about these ads and the ads are trying to stop them from thinking, (to be overly dramatic) you've just declared war against pop-culture. I'm blabbing... but think about this:
Wouldn't it be better to teach how to think critically about "dead writers" rather than fight the pressure of pop-advertising?
Just thought I'd play devil's advocate. (Also, I needed to throw in a little left-wing anti-big-business conversation to offset your last joke.)
Oh and Mikey... don't make fun of my spelling.
Brett, thank you for responding so quickly and honestly.
I don't know that it is really an issue of making better consumers or declaring war on advertisements. Certainly education should seek to make an independant thinker, but a large part of the basis for these activities is to familiarize the students with reading meaning and making meaning with multimodal and media rhetoric. Advertisements are used because they are easy to interpret on some levels, but make rather far-reaching implications about social culture on deeper levels.
Furthermore, you must think of writing and reading rhetoric as something everyone must learn to do, not just "humanities people." An Introductory Comp. class may be attended by students whose future lies in the advertising industry. In essence, you can expect to teach some students to use the very rhetoric you may inspire them to look at critically.
Ideally, you inspire all your students to think critically about this media and therefore build a future where people are less likely to respond to a system designed to remove thought from the buying process; however, I am not going to lie and play the dough-eyed optimist. Yes, I'd like all of my students to become aware of the influence of these forms of media for the practical purpose of building a more intelligent population, but my job is to give them the skills to use the power of media, not to make them hate capitolism--although to raise a critical awareness of the problems with the system is not a bad move. I suppose the line is subtly drawn between making them aware of and critical of the rhetoric at work and making them dislike the system altogether.
All in all, I think that there must be room for "traditional" literary analysis and the more contemporary brand. I don't think that one is better than the other. Certainly our more traditional literary texts are more skillfully wrought than the average advertisement--that is not the issue. Perhaps, the media are not equal, but the importance of making meaning from each is of equal importance in the newly connected world.
OH I GOT A COMMENT FOR YOU! First I would like to say that I agree with Mike.... and Brett.
I think that it is important for students to be able to look at pop culture ads objectively, because it will probably be easier for them to relate to and analyze in a meaning full way. Since it is easier they will build confidence and be able to tackle harder tasks better, as well as being able building skills more quickly. Also if you start with an activity like this it is more likely to engage a student to get them emotionally involved with the class (as apposed to dead writers). Next I agree with Brett, humanities are girly, and when I write up a 20 page technical document I am proud of my 1000 spelling errors and the fact that I haven't actually used any complete sentences. Communications is important in technical fields, but it gets seriously compromised... because it doesn't affect our pay scale enough, and it isn't economical for me to proofread (generally). If someone wants to know what my scratch means, they can come find me (and if they fire me... well, who cares if they can't read it). Man, it would be nice to be able to communicate effectively without effort though, I just talked to a co-worker about that today.
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