Blogging Pedagogy

The thoughts below meander a bit. They're mostly aimed at those who teach First-year Composition, but may be useful to instructors in other disciplines. I was inspired to cast this bit of prose out into the blogosphere by the realization that the writers I saw in class were not the writers who were composing many of the papers I was reading. No, I'm not talking about plagiarism. What I mean is that I have come to see something of a split consciousness apparent in many of my students' approaches to writing.

In the spring, I am helping to pilot a visual rhetoric textbook for the 2nd semester of the First-year Comp sequence. In the past, this course has focused on formal argument via the Toulmin Model and the Rhetorical Triangle. I'd like to maintain as much as I can of the rhetorical focus while bringing visuals into the mix--not as contingent to the verbal, but in synergy; and not purely as objects of analysis, but also as possible inventive/expressive strategies. If anyone has attempted/accomplished this in hir own classes, I'd love to hear how that worked for both teacher and student writers.