If
business and technical
communication is increasingly electronic, then one must teach students
to use the new digital tools available for writing.
-Jay Bolter, Eloquent
Images
The time is right to
reflect, and to rethink radically.
-Gunther Kress, Literacy
in the New Media Age
2007: A Teacher's Journey With Student Procedures
This is
about reflection
and radical thinking. This is about educators catching up with the
shift. This is about the remediation, revolution, re-evolution of text.
This is about literacy--multimodal, multifaceted, multipurposeful
analysis and skill. This is about a passion, a calling, a will. This is
about a bigger picture. This is about the search for theory, the
inquiry of practice, and all that is in between. This is about failures
and the successes that can be built on such solid foundations. This is
about words, pictures, moving image and sound. This is about music.
This is about play. This is about critical consumption and production.
This is about social change. Above all else, this is about the
possibilities.
This is the new age in
composition studies.
The very nature of
writing is fluid, changing, evolving with the technologies available in
each passing era. As a result, the dimensions of literacy change along
the way. We are well into a new age of writing, and as such, it is time
to reconfigure our conceptions of literacy. In Writing Space:
Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, Jay Bolter asks
compositionists to consider the landscape of writing and literacy in
the "late age of print." He writes:
Our
literate culture is
simply using the new tools provided by digital technology to
reconfigure the relationship between the material practices of writing
and the ideal of writing that these practices express . . . The
technical and the cultural dimensions of writing are so intimately
related that it is not useful to try to seperate them: together they
constitute writing as a technology. (18-19)
Access to digital
technologies is changing the way we consume and produce text, thereby
demanding that educators provide students with rhetorical strategies
that allow them to succeed in not only traditional alphabetic print
modes of literacy (read, the traditional academic essay), but also in
the literacy of new media, which is an integral part of the digital
age.
As Gunther Kress
declares, "The time is right to reflect, and to rethink radically." In
his thought-provoking work, Literacy in the New Media Age, Kress
recognizes
. . .
that the
conditions of our present and of the near future--economic, social,
technological--are ushering in a distinctively different era of
communication. In the process some of our culture's most profound
notions are coming under challenge: what reading is; what the function
of writing; what the relations of language to thinking, to imagination,
to creativity might be. . . . A vast change is underway, with as yet
unknowable consequences. It involves the remaking of relations between
what a culture makes available as means for making meaning . . .
representational modes (speech, writing, image, gesture, music and
others) and what the culture makes available as means for distributing
these meanings as messages (the media of dissemination--book,
computer-screen, magazine, video, film, radio and chat and so on).
'Literacy,' in whatever sense, is entirely involved in that. (22)
According to Kress, it
is the time to take note and take action as the multiplicities of
literacy are revealed.
In the introduction to
Eloquent Images, Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick argue that the
correlation between visual and print literacy has existed all along,
and that it is problematic to elevate printed text over visual images.
Their collection
. . .
demonstrates that
to attempt to characterize new media as a new battleground between word
and image is to misunderstand radically the dynamic interplay that
already exists and has always existed between visual and verbal texts
and to overlook insights concerning that interplay that new media
theories and practices can foster. (1)
In the first chapter of
Eloquent Images, entitled, "Critical Theory and the Challenge of New
Media," Jay Bolter calls attention to digital media's rise to the focal
point of popular culture, and the theoretical implications of this
shift in the functions of literacy:
Digital
media continue
in this line of challenges to the dominance of the printed word, by
claiming to provide a new kind of interaction between the user/viewer
and the digital application . . . . In fact, in challenging the status
of print, visual digital media also call into question the status of
critical theory in the academy. (20-21)
If digital media are
challenging print, then it is time to allow students to take on that
challenge and apply rhetorical strategies to the available new media
applications. Just as computers ushered in the age of word processing,
making the unforgiving typewriter obsolete, so too have computers
ushered in a new age of multimedia literacy.
Composition teachers
have a responsibility to connect the traditional texts of the past to
the new media texts of today.
"Among humanists, it is
teachers of writing who are actively seeking to close this gap between
theory and practice" (Bolter 25).
It is useful here to
contemplate Anne Wysocki's thoughtful call to action in her "openings
and justifications" of the innovative, practical (read
teacher-friendly) collection entitled Writing New Media: Theory and
Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. She writes:
. . .
it is impossible
to pretend that the lives of the people coming to school have not been
shaped by texts that don't look or function like academic essays . . .
new media needs to be opened to writing . . . new media needs to be
informed by what writing teachers know, precisely because writing
teachers focus specifically on texts and how situated people learn how
to use them to make things happen. (5)
In Wysocki's terms it
seems simple, obvious. Opening writing to new media is the expected
progression in composition studies. As writing teachers, we can use
what we already know about writing and apply that knowledge to new
media. Allowing students to explore the possibilities of new media will
give them a new frame of reference and a new vehicle of expression,
enhancing their learning experience as writers of the twenty-first
century. However, the transition to new media literacy is complicated
and must be met with a willingness to offer non-traditional options for
student compositions and accept the challenges, shortcomings and
backlash against what Bolter terms the "remediation" of print.
By giving students the
option of producing a documentary in lieu of a final paper in
first-year composition courses, I have experienced the trials and
errors of integrating student-produced, multimedia texts within the
context of composition studies. In preparing for this paper, I have
undergone a sort of recursive back-peddling in the search for critical
theory to support a pedagogical process that I believe in, and hope to
improve and expand upon in the years to come. Ultimately, my goal is to
enrich the experience of my students, enhance their literacy skills in
a digital age, and engage them through the new media texts of our time.
Like any ambitious undertaking, this process begins with a great idea
and a forum to express that idea through practice. I received this
opportunity in my first year of teaching.
The year that followed
was the most difficult and rewarding year of my life.
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