Free Write--Introductory Ideas: Academia and Beyond

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."