Rhetoric, Technology, Culture Spring 2011

I found your question interesting because it highlights some issues that I’m exploring in my thesis. In short, I think that always assigning traditional academic writing is just as problematic as always assigning non-traditional, personal writing.

Borrowing the concept of cross-training from athletics and applying it to writing, and conceiving of multimodal and/or new media experiences as cross-training exercises that may strengthen writing skills applicable also to traditional assignments, I’m building an argument that cross-training may be one approach to teaching writing. In case you’re unfamiliar with cross-training, rather than narrow an athlete’s workout to meet the exact physical demands of his or her primary sport, this approach instead broadens the athlete’s workout: alternative exercises diversify the muscle groups exerting effort and thus strengthen muscles underdeveloped due to months of the same movements, distribute movement to less-stressed joints and thus afford inflamed areas an opportunity to recover, and direct the athlete’s mental energies toward fresh yet productive challenges to avert mental burnout. When they return to their primary sport, many athletes reflect that cross-training has not only enhanced their physical fitness, but also renewed their passion for their sport. In my work I’m focusing on high school Language Arts classrooms, so as I imagine it, a cross-training approach to teaching writing would occasionally substitute the primary genre—perhaps the high school five-paragraph essay—with an alternative genre—such as the visual argument or photo essay—to teach critical thinking skills applicable to both genres. For example, assignments that offer students more options for composing urge students to make more decisions about aptness of mode pertaining to their composition’s purpose, context, and audience. I am suggesting that through such an approach, student writers may both pedagogically and mentally flourish, demonstrating a broader array of writing skills, exhibiting flexibility in moving between modes of writing, and possessing a more balanced understanding of writing and its applications in society.

I agree with your observation that there is an ethical gap, as Henry Jenkins terms it, and I think that if teachers don’t address it through assignments that ask students to use and produce new media texts, the gap will only continue to exist. I also think Blackmon’s article promotes the use of new media texts as more than a “curricular luxury” (as the NCTE position statement on multimodality argues). I also agree that assessment is a huge concern, and an important issue given that many critics of non-traditional essays believe them to be less rigorous. The difficulties in assessing these assignments stem from a variety of factors, including a lack of teacher training beyond print-based writing and a lack of vocabulary for the ways that multiple modes communicate. As I’ve discovered in my research, however, many proponents argue that teachers can somewhat alleviate the assessment dilemma by assessing more than just final product (i.e., the process, reflections), through backwards design (identifying the goals and outcomes first), and thinking about assessment as not only just assigning a letter grade but also providing formative feedback for future summative assignments.

Despite the well-founded concerns you mention about the Durham project and perhaps lack of attention to academic writing conventions, I want to draw another parallel to athletics to illustrate why I think such initiatives are valuable. One of the goals of athletic participation is, yes, to win games or get a scholarship. But another goal is to promote a healthy lifestyle of fitness by introducing some fun into exercise. Similarly, I think writing experiences should certainly focus on traditional genres for their academic value, but I also think it’s important that students are exposed to non-traditional genres to foster interest in writing for personal use.

Your concern is legitimate. Multimedia technology is sort of the new Wild West. There really are not any laws. Just as the laws of the Old American West barely existed, the laws—or rules in the case of composition pedagogy—of multimedia barely exist. But because we study rhetoric and rhetoric shapes composition, isn’t it beneficial to teach them in a manner wherein the rules are not absolute, just as they are not absolute in rhetoric or the Old West?

Although I do not think we necessarily need to choose between traditional academic writing and avant-garde technological writing, I understand your hesitations and thought-provoking analysis of the various paths we might traverse. How can teachers grade this new media since the standards are not yet rigid? This question cannot be answered without much thought and even then, only partially, only relationally.

Interestingly, the implementation of technology in the classroom can unfold our assumptions about traditional academic criticism. Since the academic literary essay is a relatively recent development, by showing the way we construct standards with this new media might shed light on how humans constructed standards for traditional criticism.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this essay. I found it insightful and challenging. I’m not entirely sure what the answers are to the questions you pose due to their importance to women and men of letters. Now I need to spend more time thinking about your podcast and its implications for composition in the years to come.

Hi Christa,

Good job with the podcast, and thanks again for being so helpful on the Facebook page -- you guys were amazing to answer all the questions we threw at you!

I know several other commenters have mentioned this in regards to your podcast but it struck me immediately when listening -- I don't know that teaching either academic writing or media-based composition should necessarily be mutually exclusive. I think you raise an excellent point in that this is certainly something that needs to be explored, and to answer your question, in light of recent developments in pedagogy in regards to the advances of technology, I think that students (especially freshmen) really need to be taught how to write both for academic papers as well as for academic media projects.

I think what it comes down to is that whether you are writing a formal paper or you're creating a podcast for a class there is still the air and expectation of academia about the work. It is important to consider the media you're using to judge audience, tone, and even, as you point out, proper method of citation and credit. Freshmen should absolutely be taught to write appropriately for college and higher education -- I certainly had no idea how to write a good paper coming out of high school, and there are definitely days now that I feel like I'm still working on it -- but I think to only teach one or the other would be a disservice to the students.

As I think someone (Kristen?) mentioned in their comment, a big part of this is, of course, the responsibility of the teacher -- after all, as we've discussed before, it's hard for a teacher to teach something with which they personally have no experience. But if students are going to be using resources like Blackboard, podcasts, Facebook groups, blogs and other forms of new media with greater frequency, then I think establishing the importance of academic uses (however that may be interpreted, based on the, as you put it, space of the media) for all these different forms is no different than teaching students how to write a good paper because we're entering a phase of pedagogy where they all must measure up to an academic standard. While I absolutely don't think traditional paper writing should be in any way diminished in terms of importance, I also don't think teachers should ignore or turn a blind eye to the technologies springing up around us. The difficulty for these teachers is establishing a precedent for using these technologies academically -- there aren't standardizations for this kind of thing yet, so we're still searching for general, basic principals that can be used universally. But the more we utilize and teach students about using these technologies in a way that is appropriate for academic studies, the sooner we can make academic standards for new media more ubiquitous. The new media are being used in academics, and if professors don't take the time to teach younger students how to use it properly early on the harder it will be for them to utilize it appropriately when the time comes.

Thanks for all of the comments. Obviously, there is a mixture of views on these issues and I don't know the answers either. I know I said I was making it out to be an either/or situation, but I just meant with the focus of the course, not with the assignments themselves. I think incorporating media is a great idea, and students need to learn how to use it somewhere. However, I think (as someone mentioned) it's easier to teach students to compose on different virtual spaces after teaching the traditional skills acquired in the academic essay.

Hey –

I, too, have the same worries that you examine in this podcast. I haven’t taught students in years, but, from what I hear, writing among students is getting worse and worse. I know that some – as you bring attention to – blame this digression on technological tools: text messaging, instant messenger, and email. What I have heard is that these technological advancements, that in which provides us a medium to write, cause us to practice sloppy and thus poor writing skills (i.e. failing to use complete sentences, slang terms, and misspelling).

While I have to agree with these critics to an extent, I don’t think, however, that we should exclude media writing from composition courses, as media writing is indeed a form of writing, even if it defies “traditional” composition. But, just to take this argument to a further extent, we have to scope in on what “traditional” composition is? For instance, if you juxtapose scholarly writing today with scholarly writing in the 18th century, you will notice that there is a huge difference between these two forms of composition. Thus, I have to agree with Kyle’s point (above), in that we need to open the door to media writing in the classroom, therefore progressing composition altogether.

Yet, that does not mean that I think that we should condone bad writing. Bad writing is bad writing; I don’t think that we should ever forget that. Notwithstanding, I think that media writing can not only be seen as “good writing”; more importantly, as a piece of writing that can engage with the reader even more than a prose piece.

Great post - this is a topic that really interests me.

Best,
Steve