ABSTRACT

This paper reports the results of an inquiry into Electrate Dream Interpretation (EDI), a first-year composition project that challenges students to unearth epiphanies about themselves, their own voices, and society through video game play, database management and data mining, as well as the modern hermeneutic/therapeutic of Jungian dream interpretation. EDI was studied because of its situation. It is situated within the framework of electracy (the "complement" and "supplement" to literacy) ("EGS," 2015). Thus, the project is reclassified from a "multimodal argument" to the parity of an "avante garde art practice" that necessarily cuts-up, mashes, smashes, and supplants "critical thinking, reading, and writing" ("logocentrism") while simultaneously improving that very skill-set for the sake of the Self's own discoveries and the Collective's institutional obligations. EDI sheds light on how technologies and individuals work dialectically to form identities in the composition classroom. EDI works from the hypothesis that not only do students have the capacity to become "individuals" as artists, as avatars, as players playfully engaged in constructive self-discovery, individuation, and expression, but also that students' learned wisdoms could teach us much about pedagogical ailments. (The results of the study show that the hypothesis is, in fact, generalizable.) (Moreover, this webtext finds that EDI serves as a valuable example of how technologies and individualities work dialectically to form identities.) (Therefore, this webtext recommends the project's implementation at locations beyond the classrooms of Clemson University.)

About the Author: Kate Hanzalik is a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design at Clemson University. Her research includes writing program administration, digital humanities, and the ways in which economics shapes the intellectual and material conditions of composition classrooms. Her work has appeared in Itineration and Journal of Writing in Creative Practice. Her essay about the ethics of video games is forthcoming in The Good Life and the Greater Good in Global Contexts (Lexington Books, Jan. 2006).