- Audience awareness. Students will analyze audience and purpose in rhetorical situations and make appropriate choices. Measurement: observation and analysis of artifacts produced, including active participation in classroom discussion and blogs.
- Critical thinking. Students will become more conscious of their processes for planning, drafting, revising, and editing of writing. Students will take an active role in summarizing, synthesizing, and presenting course content. Measurement: completion of informal and formal writing assignments at a quality level.
- Diversity and multiculturalism. Students will generate the type and amount of information required by a given rhetorical situation. Measurement: active participation in classroom discussion and blogs.
- Grammatical information presentation. Students will arrange material to elicit the intended audience's response achieve an effective tone and voice for a given rhetorical situation. Measurement: successful completion of an individual presentation.
- Stylistic information presentation. Make stylistic choices appropriate for a given rhetorical situation. Measurement: successfully create and report on applications of core composition concepts through collaboration.
- Communication skills. Understand how to present a proposal orally, using appropriate visuals. Measurement: successfully create, manage, produce, and report on artifacts through collaboration, including active participation in classroom discussion and blogs.
Learning Objectives
The objective of the humanities in general is to expand knowledge of the human condition and human cultures, especially in relation to behaviors, ideas, and values expressed in works of human imagination and thought. Through study in disciplines and subjects such as composition and rhetoric, students engage in critical analysis and develop an appreciation of the humanities as fundamental to the health and survival of society. Upon completion of this course, students will be able to demonstrate thinking and skills related to:
The objective of the humanities in general is to expand knowledge of the human condition and human cultures, especially in relation to behaviors, ideas, and values expressed in works of human imagination and thought. Through study in disciplines and subjects such as composition and rhetoric, students engage in critical analysis and develop an appreciation of the humanities as fundamental to the health and survival of society. Upon completion of this course, students will be able to demonstrate thinking and skills related to:
I have learned a lot of new things about composition studies. I'm at the point in this semester where I keep my head down, hyper-focused on completing projects and seminar papers, but I have already had a few moments where I surprised myself by how much I've actually learned. A friend, who teaches English in France, was kind enough to accept a late night voice call to help me talk through my ideas about one of my projects; and, because she had earned the equivalent of an MA in English from a French university, I had assumed that we had a shared knowledge about composition studies. I brought up my ideas of what I could do with multimodal composition, expressivism, and postprocess pedagogy for my project, and for several minutes, there was only the sounds of us slaying hordes of demons in Diablo 3. I asked if my idea was just that bad, and she finally admitted, "Yeah, you lost me like ten minutes ago. I have no idea what any of that theory stuff actually means." So, on the spot, I was able to explain all of it well enough for her to understand what I was talking about.
I know anecdotes are a terrible source of credible evidence (I can't count how many times I've pasted that cookie-cutter comment into students' drafts), but I was very pleased that I was able to explain these theories clearly enough for someone else to understand them. The cynic in me knew all along that my explanations were horribly oversimplified and incomplete, so I also recognize that I have a long road ahead of me to get where I want to go. But still, success.
Justin,
ReplyDeleteYou are probably five steps ahead of me when it comes to that keywords final at the end of the semester. I also think it's awesome that you have people who will listen to you talk about composition theory outside of class. My family and friends don't want to hear it. I am curious about how you were connecting multimodal composition, post-process pedagogy, and expressivism. It sounds like an interesting project.
That's a really long explanation, so maybe I'll do that for this week's blog post. I originally wrote the paper for a theoretical seminar paper, but then my professor wanted to try my ideas out in a classroom research experiment, which was an amazing opportunity. Basically, I used a multimodal lecturing technique to teach the principles of visual rhetoric (from Arnheim and Bang). However, the experiment was whether or not I could teach students to make informed rhetorical choices about what technologies are the most appropriate at different stages of the writing process, which I expanded to include medium, mode of dissemination, delivery, reception, user's interaction with the medium, and, finally, the user's perception of the message. This sounds super complicated in words, but I have a lovely doodle that makes it simple once you see the whole process. Essentially, though, the experiment worked quite well. It was a pilot study, so there's a lot of improvement to be done, but still.
ReplyDeleteTalking with my friend, I was better able to describe what "multimodal" composition is by describing it in terms of post-process. Especially in multimodal comp, every artifact is unique, and there is no one, generic way to produce something that could be labelled "multimodal." In a way, the choices of medium and mode of dissemination are expressivist because they imply or endorse some of the author's values. Jodi Shipka gives an example of a student who turned in a personal narrative in the form of notecards put inside of a wine bottle. He wrote about his experiences growing up with an alcoholic parent, and the medium itself was a visceral recreation of that violence because, to even access the essay, the wine bottle had to first be broken. I limited my students to visual rhetoric in document design, but I was amazed at the artifacts they produced. Some of them were even better than mine.
Justin,
ReplyDeleteI think, to begin with, that you make an incredibly valuable distinction between critical thinking and critical engagement. I think it is imperative that, as instructors (or soon-to-be), we consider the necessity of remaining critically engaged within our own classrooms. Although I agree that we need to be able to engage with other composition critics and theorists, I think that it is more important that we ensure that, within the classroom, we are providing assignments that engage us at a critical level as well. I think it is oftentimes easy to develop an assignment that we would find boring if we were expected to complete it; in order to prevent this, I think that instructors need to be actively invested within the classroom to such a degree that they learn just as much from each class as the students do. I really like that you've made this observation, and I think it is essential to composition in all respects.