Blogging Pedagogy

Currents in Electronic Literacy (ISSN 1524-6493) solicits article-length submissions related to the theme below. Submissions are due by Friday, January 15, 2010.

Spring 2010 issue: "Gaming-Across-the-Curriculum: Playing as a Way of Learning"

“Good game design,” writes James Paul Gee in “Learning and Games,” “has a lot to teach us about good learning, and contemporary learning theory has something to teach us about how to design even better and deeper games.” The burgeoning field of pedagogical gaming has inspired emergent journals (GameStudies; Games and Culture), new institutions (e.g., the Game Studies Research Center at the IT University of Copenhagen), and interdisciplinary approaches. This issue of Currents features guest editors Jan Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes of Clemson University’s Gaming Across the Curriculum (GAC) program, which examines current and potential uses of gaming within the academy. The issue will incorporate games created by students and faculty, best practices of the use of computer games in teaching, articles that theorize play and pedagogy, innovative approaches to cross-disciplinary collaboration using computer games, frameworks of GAC white papers, and so forth.

Currents encourages unconventional and emergent modes of scholarship. The editors solicit articles, games (with instructions and background), GAC curriculum designs, and other scholarly treatments of “gaming-across-the-curriculum.” All submissions should adhere to MLA style guidelines for citations and documentation. Submissions should state any technical requirements or limitations. Currents reserves all copyrights to published articles and requires that all of its articles be housed on its Web server.

It is the policy of Currents in Electronic Literacy that all published contributions must meet the W3C accessibility standards. While all Currents articles are accessible, readers are advised that these same articles may contain links to other Web sites that do not meet accessibility guidelines.

Contact: currents@cwrl.utexas.edu

Teachers of English and Rhetoric are often familiar with ways that pop culture artifacts can acquaint students with advanced rhetorical concepts. However, when it comes to encouraging formal analyses of the texts we run into every day (television, movies, advertisements, web sites, YouTube videos, public spaces, and interpersonal relationships), we often run into a barrage of questions such as "how do we analyze and cite billboards and advertisements?" or "how can we analyze ways in which television shows treat issues relating to gender or class?" Jonathan Silverman and Dean Rader's The World is a Text (Prentice Hall, 2008) seeks to address these questions head-on. Using elements of semiotics and rhetorical theory to set up their method of explaining textual analysis, Silverman and Rader's book seeks to help teachers and students engage with a wide range of texts and how they can be used to engage topics such as race, gender, class, and technology.

Since the most recent edition of Silverman and Rader's book is fairly new, Blogging Pedagogy sought out instructors who have been trying out the book. We caught up with Catherine Coleman, who is currently using the book for a course entitled "The Rhetoric of Texas." Check out her responses to our questions below.

Q: What are the best and/or most useful aspects of the book?

CC: I like the fact that The World is a Text breaks down rhetorical analysis into mediums and focuses on one medium, critical lens or topic per chapter. For example, I teach the first chapter, "Reading and Writing About the World Around You" early in the semester because I feel that it encourages students to jump into rhetoric. In this chapter and throughout The World is a Text, Johnathan Silverman and Dean Rader strive to make readers aware that the things they experience every day -- their campuses, fashions, video games, social networking sites and videos viewed and posted on YouTube -- are also rhetorical situations that they can gain a clearer understanding of and critical perspective on through observation and analysis.

Another very useful aspect of The World is a Text is that Silverman and Rader provide concise introductions to each medium or topic (including race and ethnicity, gender, advertising, journalism, mass media, and relationships, to name a few) and then include well-rounded selections of unexcerpted critical essays on each medium or topic written by scholars, journalists and even some college students. These essays help students in Rhetoric to recognize how academic cultural studies work.

Q: How does the book familiarize students with or help you teach rhetorical concepts?

CC: The World is a Text foregrounds the rhetorical principles. By the end of the Introduction (the first twenty-two pages), Silverman and Rader have provided students with a brief and helpful introduction to semiotics and semiotic situations, the history of rhetoric, the interconnection between writing, reading and thinking and a guide for building good arguments about popular culture texts. By the time that students reach page seventy, they have been exposed to a helpful guide on how to find an approach for writing essays, a detailed tour through the basic steps of the writing process, a guide to making solid arguments and the types of rhetorical appeals and fallacies that we will return to throughout the semester.

Because Silverman and Rader try to make this part of the text so concise and accessible, I have found that moving too quickly through it can leave students overwhelmed and confused. I tend to try to slow down the pace by providing supplemental materials and by making sure that I create activities that challenge students to really learn the concepts and not simply read them and never think about them again. The book never returns to these concepts explicitly, so I find myself revisiting them with my class and referring students to this part of the book when they need to refresh their understanding of important concepts like ethos, pathos and logos or when they encounter fallacies in their own arguments.

Q:What kinds of classes might the book work best for? Are there any courses that this book would be less useful for?

CC: This book would be fantastic for any class that takes up many different mediums, types of media and subjects. The primary virtue of The World is a Text is definitely breadth and not depth. It was perfect for a course like RHE 309: The Rhetoric of Texas, where the different units ask students to first explore folk culture and music, then representations of Texans in the mass media and finally Texan films and films about Texas. However, if an instructor is teaching a course geared around rhetorical study or analysis of a specific type of media (like advertising or film) or critical approach (like critical race or gender studies), they would probably find this book to be too broad.


Q: Is there anything that you find lacking in the book? If so, have you found any good ways to compensate for these drawbacks?

CC: While this book is excellent for introducing students to cultural research and analysis, it does not include any information on scholarly research or the use of databases. I supplement the text by spending part of a few class days introducing students to the library website and database searches. Also, as I state above, Silverman and Rader's treatment of rhetorical concepts is cursory and would likely require supplementation in most Rhetoric courses.

Q: Do you have any other comments about the book that might be worth sharing?

CC: The essays and images in this book are great.  Silverman and Rader have done a great job of securing engaging and inspiring pieces of cultural analysis and visual rhetoric and my students have responded very positively to these parts of the text. Although a number of the concepts Silverman and Rader introduce in the text are new and therefore quite challenging for most Rhetoric students, (the authors introduce semiotics, critical race and gender studies, feminist, queer, and Marxist approaches to cultural texts) the book is also written in an incredibly accessible and inviting style.

This semester, I'm teaching an introductory literature course entitled Women's Popular Genres, aimed primarily at students who intend to major in English. Perhaps because of the content of the class -- two words: Jane Austen -- it has also attracted students from other majors who want to read and talk about the works. Some students feel very comfortable with the process of writing about literature, while others who work primarily in a different discipline find it more of a stretch.

In this first half of the course, they write three short papers (2-4 pp.) analyzing some element of a work we've read. These papers are intended to help the students learn to construct short, specific analytical arguments about literary works. This requires them to construct strong and narrowly focused thesis statements.

I wanted to create a thesis-building worksheet for my students: a simple step-by-step process that would offer students who are new to making literary arguments a structure upon which they could model their own theses. As I Googled around a bit, I discovered that it's tough to find good examples of this sort of thing -- every college writing center has a webpage or a PDF handout with plenty of explanatory text about creating thesis statements, but very few present more linear instructions. I ended up producing my own handout, which I'm attaching to this post, in case anyone's interested. I also found a number of useful primers on developing a thesis.

For literature classes, the neatest is Dartmouth's page on thesis development, which not only includes this handy checklist:

• Does my thesis sentence attempt to answer (or at least to explore) a challenging intellectual question?
• Is the point I'm making one that would generate discussion and argument, or is it one that would leave people asking, "So what?"
• Is my thesis too vague? Too general? Should I focus on some more specific aspect of my topic?
• Does my thesis deal directly with the topic at hand, or is it a declaration of my personal feelings?
• Does my thesis indicate the direction of my argument? Does it suggest a structure for my paper?
• Does my introductory paragraph define terms important to my thesis? If I am writing a research paper, does my introduction "place" my thesis within the larger, ongoing scholarly discussion about my topic?
• Is the language in my thesis vivid and clear? Have I structured my sentence so that the important information is in the main clause? Have I used subordinate clauses to house less important information? Have I used parallelism to show the relationship between parts of my thesis? In short, is this thesis the very best sentence that it can be?

... but also an excellent walkthrough of the process of developing a thesis based on specific literary evidence, under the section entitled "Constructing a thesis: a writer's clinic for beginners." Highly recommended.

Other sites I referred to when constructing the worksheet include the Harvard writing center's page about theses and, of course, UT's Undergraduate Writing Center, which has a nice handout on thesis development as well.

In "Invention, Part I" I elaborated an invention strategy that emphasizes experience and juxtaposition. What I failed to do, however, was to provide an overview of more canonical (pun, pun) conceptions of invention. In this post, I would like to use the occasion of reviewing two contemporary textbooks, Elizabeth Stolarek and Larry Juchartz’ Classical Techniques and Contemporary Arguments (Pearson/Longman, 2007) and Catherine G. Laterell’s ReMix: Reading + Composing Culture (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010), to fill that void.

  Invention:

Inventio is the first of Aristotle’s five canons of rhetoric, the subsequent four being memoria (memory), pronuntiatio (delivery), dispositio (arrangement), and elocutio (style). In their Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee define Invention as “the part of rhetoric that helps rhetors find arguments” (36), but their decision to include six chapters under the heading of “Invention” suggests the breadth of the process. They begin with a discussion of kairos, the timeliness of an argument, but also, with regard to invention processes, an indicator of the role of experience, quotidian or otherwise, in generating ideas and inquiries. Crowley and Hawhee then move on to Cicero’s stasis theory and Aristotle’s topoi, both of which represent relatively conventional methods of arriving at an argument in composition classes. But they also include the analytical tropes of ethos, pathos, and logos, suggesting the role of reading/analysis/interpretation in determining one’s own arguments.

In summary, I would say that Crowley and Hawhee demonstrate the significance of cultural, daily, and communal experience in juxtaposition with those of others and, in particular, how they are articulated in speech and writing.

Classical Techniques and Contemporary Arguments:

For the most part, Stolarek and Juchartz offer conventional invention strategies, including using pro/con grids and brainstorming in the context of “Examining Argument Through Dialectic and Induction” (chapter 3), as well as Cicero’s stases, freewriting, and mapping in the context of “Writing Inductive Essays and Mediated Arguments” (Chapter 4).  But I want to attend here to a sometimes maligned technique included in this textbook: stylistic imitation. Though the authors include line-by-line stylistic imitation assignments in the context of teaching rhetorical situation and strategy, my own use of similar assignments suggests that imitation can often lead students to more self-consciously approach the invention process itself.

Stylistic imitation requires a kind of blend between rhetorical analysis and literary close-reading as it asks the students to identify their “sense” of the passage’s or text’s style as a first step and then to move on to interrogate the text for how and why the text reads like it does. Once they answer those how and why questions and they identify a different context, but similar situation, they can dig more deeply into the syntactic, figurative, grammatical, and other stylistic elements as they’re forced to copy the sentence structures to apply to their particular situation.

For example, in the first weeks of my Rhetoric of Southern Rock course, we spend a lot of time introducing the Deep South and arguments made about it, one of which is W.E.B. DuBois’ "Of the Black Belt" in The Souls of Black Folk. In that descriptive essay, DuBois moves from North to South and then from East to West in rural Georgia, describing the depredation and dilapidation such little towns have incurred since Reconstruction. For the stylistic imitation assignment, I ask the students to think of an abandoned landscape or a place to which they may have returned after many years and to select a related passage in the essay that they can imitate on the level of structure. Overwhelmingly the students enjoy the assignment, and they often comment that it was more difficult than they originally thought to copy someone else’s style. At the end of the imitation, I ask them to reflect on the assignment, why they made some of the choices they did, what they notice about each rhetorical situation, and how they had to reconsider themselves as composers. Even at this early stage in what is usually an intro-to-rhetoric class, students will remark that they had to shift some syntactical unit to accommodate their different situations, or they will comment on the author’s extensive use of adjectives, prepositions, etc.

In line with my own idea of invention, then, this practice encourages students to begin thinking of themselves as writers in juxtaposition to other writers or communities of writers. It also encourages them to begin thinking about how their own experiences inform how they write.

In accordance with the conventional approaches and “classical techniques” mentioned above Stolarek and Juchartz boil invention down to "idea generation," a move that enables them to make the following caveat about writing’s recursivity:

While early rhetoricians may have seen invention as the first stage of developing an argument, contemporary composition theorists believe that idea generation can occur at any stage of writing…Some students resist suggestions to generate more ideas once they’ve begun writing their essays. These students may prefer processes that develop in linear patters. But writing is often very messy…Your willingness to re-see and rework something that you may consider already completed is central to becoming a good writer. (160)

We have all probably made some variation of this statement in teaching revision. Indeed, it highlights the need to more reflexively attend to invention as a component of revision, even if we don’t necessarily agree with the simplified "idea generation" definition these authors offer.

ReMix: Reading + Composing Culture

In many ways, this text is the polar opposite of CTCA. It doesn't, for example, refer explicitly to rhetorical principles as rhetorical principles, kneading them instead into a more contemporary and popular lexicon. Invention in this text, therefore, is always implicit; however, ReMix's conceptual framework is basically founded on the juxtaposition (re-mixing) of experience and cultural artifacts from a variety of media. In other words, invention--at least as I think of it.

In the "Introduction for Students" Latterell identifies the three guiding principles of the book:

(1)[...] as a participator in culture, you are already equipped to investigate it; (2) [...] the things that are closest to us--that we most often take for granted--are most worthy of investigation; and (3) [...] behind these artifacts of everyday life are collective assumptions that shape and reveal a culture's thinking.

This last emphasis on collective assumptions, what Stolarek and Juchartz might call commonplaces/topoi, frames the text's major methodological component. So, in "Reading and Thinking Like a Cultural Critic: Four Steps," two (and perhaps three) of the four relate to teasing out the "cultural assumptions" undergirding the artifact. Step 2, for example: Identify Cultural Assumptions; Step 3: test assumptions by considering context. The possible third is Step 1: Ask Questions.

ReMix thus begins with one of the most difficult analytical elements to impart to students: identifying an argument's warrants. But in the subtitles to its seven sections--Identity, Community, Competition, Romance, Entertainment, Nature, and Technolog--the author uses questions in the secon-person that demonstrate the text's goal of incorporating the students' experience into their evaluation and analysis of "cultural assumptions." In other words, the whole text could be seen as an extended engagement with processes of invention, demonstrating, as S&J do, its recursivity and role in the composing process.

I personally haven't used ReMix in one of my own classes, but I think at least portions of it might be really useful for getting students to more self-consciously and self-critically analyze the arguments around them.

We've been asking members of the DWRL to respond to a series of questions about the National Day on Writing, which is today, October 20. Remember that today is also the date of Cynthia Selfe's talk on the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, at 4 pm in the African American Culture Room (4.110) of the Texas Student Union. We hope to see you there!

Today's responses come from Dr. Davida Charney, professor in the Division of Rhetoric and Writing at UT. We'll be posting more responses from DWRL community members throughout the week.

What does the National Day on Writing mean for the DWRL?

The National Day on Writing means that, for one day, every person in the United States, literate or illiterate, is a stakeholder in a rhetorical situation that calls for epideictic rhetoric. By writing in response, we are all realizing through performance just what Congress performatively declared: the importance of writing.

What are some ways in which rhetoric and composition instructors can take advantage of the National Day on Writing?

Assign five minutes of free writing; ask students to create "found poems" from bits of text in their immediate environment; ask students to recall the first occasion they can remember writing; send students to the Ransom Center website to look at the on-line materials on early writing; send students to the Ransom Center to visit the Gutenberg Bible.

What does "writing" mean in this context? And how is the concept of writing changing?

Writing means using durable symbols that continue to convey meaning after the moment of composition/utterance is over. At one time, writing meant impressing symbols onto a physical object. Today, it can means getting pixels to show up. For me, the concept of writing normally involves using alpha-numeric symbol system.  Without those, it would be hard to distinguish writing from art or music.

What, in turn, are some of the ways that literacy is changing?

Literacy has broadened.  It is no longer confined to a skill usually gained in early childhood--it is a matter of life-long learning.

Regarding the DALN, why is it important to begin collecting literacy narratives at this moment? (This is related to the question of why it's important to establish such a central place for writing).

Pixels aren't as durable as clay tablets but they are much more geographically dispersed.  So we need to make sure that we have records of today's and tomorrow's forms of literacy acquisition.

It's funny to me that the first 110 congresses did not feel the need to declare writing important, but that the 111th Congress did. I wasn't exactly sure what this meant, so I decided to look at the actual language of the S. RES. 310 Expressing support for the designation of October 20, 2009, as the National Day on Writing. We are clearly in the realm of the epideictic here. There are several phrases that could have been written by any of the other 110 congresses:

• "people in the 21 st century are writing more than ever,"
• people are writing "to create meaning through composing,"
• "more and more people in every occupation deem writing as essential and influential in their work," and
• "writers continue to learn how to write for different purposes, audiences, and occasions throughout their lifetimes."

But there are a few points that should jump out at those of us theorizing so-called new media:

• Whereas developing digital technologies expand the possibilities for composing in multiple media at a faster pace than ever before;
• Whereas young people are leading the way in developing new forms of composing by using different forms of digital media;
• Whereas the National Day on Writing honors the use of the full range of media for composing, from traditional tools like print, audio, and video, to Web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis, and podcasts;

First off, I'm not so sure that the age of people really matters. As a recent article in The New York Times pointed out, even though Twitter has been, for years, hailed as the hottest social media app around, teens don't appear to be using it (yet). Access and free time seem like more important factors in the creation of emerging leaders in new media. Access to new media resources and time for free play create environments that lead to discoveries that lead to new forms of composing. Maybe I'm just feeling like an aging Gen Xer sandwiched between Boomers and Millennials, but breakdown by generation just seems so stale.

What is more interesting to me are these words: "expand" and "faster" and "different" and "full range of media." Rather than using old demographic categories like age to put people and writing in boxes, these words signal the true significance of the National Day on Writing. These are category bending words. And, as writing expands its territory like a rhizome, we begin to realize that even the rhizome has become—like a lawn—institutionalized. (This isn't the House we're talking about, people. This is the Senate.) We all now know, apparently, that writing is getting faster and expanding in multiple directions.

Whereas "whereas" is not likely to appear in a text or tweet, we should also consider how speed and expansion rewrite writing. R we prepared to deal w/ the changes of teh tech? R we ready to see speling as a fad? that U can't pin down grammar? Can we pin ABCDF on stuff we can't pin down?

The University of Minnesota Library's Assignment Calculator is a helpful resource for students who would like to view a step-by-step guide to completing their assignments and for educators who would like to emphasize that complex writing tasks can be broken down into a number of discrete activities.

By supplying a "start" date and a final due date, students get a plan of action that urges them to research, outline, draft, revise and correctly reference their papers before specific dates in the process. Additionally, each step is linked to several web resources (such as the Purdue OWL) that explain them in detail. I have found that showing this tool to my students has been helpful for reinforcing steps taught in class and a good guide for pacing in-class activities that talk students through some of the most significant steps.

I also really like the fact that the UM Library calculator does not take any steps for granted: it begins with resources that help with understanding writing prompts, topic selection, and thesis development before going into research strategies and drafting.

If you would like to check out the University of Minnesota Library's Assignment calculator, please visit the following link:

http://www.lib.umn.edu/help/calculator/

Thanks to Lydia for the link to this video about the National Day On Writing:

Coming from a literature background, when I first began teaching rhetoric and composition, I was coming in with very little training in the subject. I spent so much time learning for myself about logos, ethos, pathos, and the rhetorical situation that I failed to engage reflexively with the process of writing. Of course, at all levels of rhetoric and writing instruction we have to strike a careful balance between teaching students how to read and teaching students how to write, but one thing that I've learned over the course of almost three years is that the two processes can come together in a critical and reflective understanding of the processes of invention.

I first began actively incorporating invention (aka pre-writing) practices into my assignments last year in my Spring 2009 Rhetoric of Southern Rock class. The Spring semester usually reflects the wisdom and experience I gained in the Fall semester, but this time I had attended a valuable presentation at the Thomas R. Watson Conference at the University of Louisville. The theme of the conference was "The New Work of Composing," and this panel adddressed how to teach invention in multimedia composition assignments. The big revelation for me was their focus on (1) reflecting on one's experience as a critical moment in invention and (2) juxtaposition. Regarding the former, the panelists drew attention to what we, as writers, often consider moments of intuition, those "aha!" moments that come in the most quotidian of activities: taking a shower, riding on the bus, riding your bike. It is most often these moments when we're less focused on the inquiry at hand that useful insights or questions are raised. But it's also those useful questions and insights that can most confuse students about the process of invention. Students can often feel that they aren't "smart enough" to come up with those kinds of questions, and it can be difficult as an instructor to explain where those ideas come from. After being faced with this lament on numerous occasions, I have learned to draw attention to experience as an inspirational factor in forming a research interst and focusing it into a research inquiry. In, for example, my first two paper assignments last Spring, I encouraged students to begin with musical styles in which they're interested. I had had difficulties in the Fall semester with students making perfunctory decisions regarding what they were writing about, resulting in several people writing shoddy papers about the same topic. In the Spring, greater emphasis on their own interests led to increased reflection on the nature of those interests and their relationship with the material of the course. I then got fantastic papers about, for example, a Children of Bodom cover of CCR's "Lookin' Out My Backdoor" by a student who then went on to cultivate a persona as a hardcore/metal aficionado in the context of his group's webzine. Other students examined more recent alternative, R&B, and pop bands and placed them in a Southern Rock context, which led the entire class to more critically assess and define what we mean by "Southern Rock."

Which leads me  to the topic of juxtaposition:  the panel at the Watson conference was focused on juxtaposing multimedia, but they also suggested that juxtaposition qua juxtaposition can be a strategy in the invention process. What happens when a student puts her/his life experience next to a scholarly argument? What does that juxtposition "create"? And isn't that invention? The same can be said for putting two scholarly articles next to each other: what do they produce? This is, ultimately, what we ask students to do in RTHE306 courses when we ask them to "map" a controversy, but calling attention to the practice itself yields, in my experience, much more fruitful results.

Finally, I want to turn to invention in the Literature classroom. In an enlightening roundtable discussion presented by the American Literatures Group's Academics in Action symposium last Spring, a graduate assistant instructor provided her useful application of Joanna Wolfe's "A Method for Teaching Invention in the Gateway Literature Class." Pedagogy. (3:3) 2003, 399-425. Wolfe provides seven common tropes of literature scholarship to encourage students to begin thinking  about how they want to approach their texts. From a process-oriented standpoint, in my estimation, the tropes Wolfe provides are exercises in juxtaposition within the framework of more focused reading and methodological practices. Translation for students: how does your reading fit alongside the "ubiquity" "appearance vs. reality," etc. model?

I include for my students an extended discussion of the importance of invention with all my paper assignemtns now. I find that demystifying the initial stages of the writing process for students makes the whole process, especially revision, work much more smoothly. Below are some screenshots of my current Invention page, which is mostly text and so kind of boring, but it offers a sense of how I develop the assignment for my Lit students:

For the next post, I'll attend to how various textbooks discuss invention. Most textbooks, I've found, rely on the traditional "brainstorming" and "freewriting" models, which can be useful, but I'd like to explore what other models textbooks endorse.

An important note from the DWRL director:

The Computer Writing & Research Lab has become the Digital Writing & Research Lab. This is the second name change for what began in the late 1980s as the Computer Research Lab, which was founded by Jerry Bump and a handful of graduate student hackers who literally drilled holes in the walls in a crude but successful attempt to wire a lab and a classroom for synchronous online communication. The innovation of the CRL, as John Slatin once defined it, was its pairing of a “computational lab” with a “classroom,” of technological research and development with teaching, making teaching a research activity and granting research a pedagogical investment.

The CRL became the CWRL around 1993, continuing the very same dedication to cutting-edge research and outstanding teaching at the intersection of writing, rhetoric, literature, and technology. Now the CWRL has become the DWRL, a new name for an abiding vision.

On behalf of the whole DWRL team, I invite you to join us for the performative rechristening (cake cutting) at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, October 14, in FAC 8. Open house from 10-3.

Sincerely, Diane Davis, Director

The name change is indicative of the adaptive quality that makes the lab such an interesting and exciting place to be. In addition to cutting cake, we'll unveil new logos, redesigned Web sites, and a new advisory board for Blogging Pedagogy.