Is New Media too Much for Introductory Comp? (Just a question)
I'm certain we all have a vested interest in theorizing and applying new media to our teaching and composing otherwise we wouldn't be in this class.
But I'm curious to know how people feel about new media in a class like 106. Having new media projects often makes my students more engaged, but I also feel frustrated sometimes by the amount of information I feel obligated to cover over the course of 16 weeks. It seems like so much can slip through the cracks, and we all know that alphabetic texts are difficult to produce as they are.
So my question to anyone willing to answer is how do you feel about incorporating new media into an introductory composition course:
Is it too much information for one semester?
Are you thankful for the opportunity to open up the discussion of composing to other media?
Is it helpful to think of introductory comp as a survey course in all things rhetoric as opposed to a course on writing alphabetic texts?
I appreciate any input and ideas.
Comments
No, No it's Not (Just an Answer)
You know I'm always down to weigh in on questions of this nature. I guess the questions come down to how the individual views what the composition class is and what role it should serve (which is where these "obligations" you speak of come into play). I personally view it as a "composition" class in the most fluid notion of that word, and I feel it's a class where the rhertorical situation should be fundamental. Coming out of those mindsets, I simply can't see myself teaching the genre of the "academic essay," whatever that is. Yes, the academic essay has a rhetorical situation, but it's an incredibly limiting one, an audience of one if you will (the professor, who may be at best standing in for a broadly defined academic audience . . . yuck) and its purpose is also incredibly limited for me, coming down to proving the repetition or synthesis of some knowledge, but rarely knowledge co-produced with others to any purpose beyond making it fit that form. Nor do I feel the standard essay in any of its forms is of much use to many people outside the realm of the academy. All that said, I don't feel any obligations to teach a lot of things that I know many other professors do. I don't see composition as a service course to neccessarily prepare students for writing in their other classes (although this is a tricky statement, because I do see cross-over potential, just not of the "look, I showed you what other professors and academic audiences will want kind). I'm not a fan of WAC (ask, Morgan, she hears it from me all the time). It's a course in rhetoric, analysis, multiple perspectives, idea expression, and an extensive look into how this wacky thing we call language works . . . but it's not an overarching specific prep for how to succeed in college. I'm not sure if this quote was from this week's book or not, cause I can't find it now, but someone said something to the effect of: we either teach to college, or we teach to life. As potentially impossible and grandioise as "teaching to life" sounds, I would rarther err on the side of shooting for that.
So . . . put all this together and I don't really see any struggles for time, or any grand slips through the cracks (there are always slips through the cracks, but nothing that I lose sleep over). I look around at the kinds of texts students are constantly exposed to and I look at the texts they are already composing in their everyday lives, and I don't see thesis statements, "high art" literature, odes to grammar, or texts where the materiality is irrelevant. I see dynamic interaction of text, image, juxtaposition, context, materiality, pleasure, identity, and more. For me to focus on anything else would feel not only false to me, but I imagine it would feel false to them too; and frankly, I couldn't get out of bed every morning for that.
I don't know
I do want to have my students practice rhetorical situations that I deem useful, as Mark says. I think that as long as we allow students outlets to practice expression that we can envision them using in life, I think we're covered.
It seems like the emerging difference between Mark and I is the situations we think will be useful for the students to learn. Mark looks to be willing to give life experience, and everyday, cultural navigational abilities to his students. I think that's important, but I'm thinking that I'd like to let students practice being impressive in a more conventional, "collegiate" way- being loquacious or confident or persuasive in a formal environment. I'm not doing a very good job describing this, but I mean that I would like to have class that had a few more business writing-type opportunities. Be part of the machine! I don't know that this is a good idea, but I know that there is some type of practical use.
In that way, as long as students can practice useful situational navigation in varying media, it's doable.