I see my role, and--to a rather nosy extent--the role of other composition instructors as preparing students to succeed in the university and "the outside world." It's rather simplistic, I admit, but there it is. What this preparation means, though, is where I focus most of my pedagogy; for example, I take it for granted that my pedagogy needs to incorporate and embrace computers, community (often a la social networking), and new literacies (such as the blog, wikis, and the Twitter).
This assumption is certainly not shared by many of my colleagues, and so I realize I may be in the minority when I say that digital writing is critical to my students' professional success. However, I feel that to ignore this push is to ignore some of the important literacies that my students already bring to the classroom; while composition assumes that students have become literate in the sorts of skills that the gatekeepers look for--success on the SAT/ACT and college placement exams kinda demonstrates this assumption--it still feels to me like there's not enough use of digital literacies in the composition classroom. Students may enter my classroom well-versed in the five-paragraph essay, the presentation of a thesis supported by evidence, and the importance of running their spell-checkers before they print off their papers, but each year more students are entering the classroom as adepts of blogging and microblogging, web research, visual rhetoric, web design, and other literacies that incorporate forms of writing that were nonexistent in the composition classroom that I entered in 1998.
Yancey's proposal is both refreshing and reinforcing for my pedagogy because it provides a focus for my praxis: we should approach the composition classroom as an barn-raising rather than a gated community. Yancey describes this barn-raising--an analogy I use because of its associations with shared communities and inclusiveness, as well as the necessity of these things in accomplishing an otherwise difficult goal--as "a new curriculum for the 21st century, a curriculum that carries forward the best of what we have created to date, that brings together the writing outside of school and that inside" (308). In the barn-raising analogy, the classroom would be the new homestead, and the community that helps to raise that first barn--the one building that enables the work of the farm to begin--comes, of course, from the outside. The parallel to the gated community should be quite obvious: rather than welcoming the support of the outside world, the gated community erects barriers to shelter those inside from the influence of those without.
Finally, I must recognize two things: first, the irony of using the barn-raising analogy to describe the use of digital literacies; second, the more important point that this is not a new idea. I do not know of any composition classrooms among my colleagues that are hostile to new literacies, and in my occasional polling of compositional sentiment towards digital writing I hear (lukewarm) acceptance of the inevitable. However, what I also hear is a great deal of "It's great, but it's not for me/not my style." My role as a composition instructor is to make it "my style," and to pass that on to the .5 future composition instructors who pass through my classroom every year.
You did a nice job here engaging w/ Yancey. I like that you used a quote, did some summary, and engaged w/ some of her main points. Bravo.
ReplyDeleteI'd be curious to see you unpack the following: "digital writing is critical to my students' professional success." Define digital, define writing, and define success. How far does it go? How far should we go?
You say: "Finally, I must recognize two things: first, the irony of using the barn-raising analogy to describe the use of digital literacies; second, the more important point that this is not a new idea." But barn-raising is a technology, is it not? Heh. I think you touched on the key reasons for this metaphor (the collective in large part, and the public). Second, you're right again, it isn't a new idea, but you'd be shocked how many folks in the field find it a bit of an anathema. It's not so much that they don't think it's important, but they really think it is NOT the job of first-year comp to do this type of work. First-year comp, in their minds, is there to "fix" students writing and prepare them for college "writing" (words-in-a-row-on-a-page). Ask someone in another dept (a grad student or faculty) what they think your job is in 101 and I bet you'll get an earful about comma splices and thesis statements.
So, what to do? Maybe this class will answer that? That might be too hopeful...
Yeah, I usually keep it quiet that I teach Engl 101 at the GPSA get-togethers; in fact, I've actually lied at times and said I was self-funded. I know what I'm going to hear, and I really prefer to be pleasant.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with defining digital writing is that as soon as I do, the definition will be either out of date or complicated by new mediums. So what I'll say is this: students need to know how to write for the web; they need to know how to compose writing in different digital mediums, including presentations, word processors, and database software; they need to be able to recognize discourses, and enter the conversation; and finally, they'll need to be able to design and compose XHTML texts.
Now, I don't think it's my job to teach them all of these; hell, my students still have trouble understanding that if Firefox doesn't work, they should switch to another browser--teaching web design is years away. But they do need to leave my class understanding that writing is not just "punch out an opinion, loosely supported by cherrypicked quotes, in MS Word. Play around with the font until you reach the minimum length." MS Word might get them through college, but it won't get them through the office.