Sean: exigency and competency?

[Anonymous]

#338

Hayles and Palmeri both ask a great threshold question: if we accept that digital rhetorics and literacies are now indispensable both to our teaching and our scholarship, how are we trained to teach them?

This is really exciting for me because at Hunter right now we are conducting a small pilot study of a new model for FYW that embraces digital, multi-modal composition.  We’ve been asking ourselves the same question:  how are we competent to attempt this?  Our first answer so far is a practical one: we have no choice because pencil and paper writing instruction and writing tests are no longer a defensible option.  But exigency does not speak to competency.

Palmeri argues that composition scholars have long considered questions of multi-modal composition and we can bridge from there:  “I started to believe that . . . the composition tradition had many insights to offer contemporary digital multimodal teachers” (3).  At Hunter, we are trying a modified “writing about writing” approach.  My course now starts with excerpts from Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers, and Sondra’s Felt Sense.

Hayles makes a similar connection when she argues that the changes caused by digital technologies can be seen as deeply embodied: a form of environmental, hyper-accelerated evolution she calls “technogenesis” (17).  But while Palmeri believes we can draw on comp theory, Hayles suggests we turn to Comparative Media Studies, a subfield “at the margins of literary culture” that has long considered the technical limitations of different forms of texts (7).  As a pedagogical tool, Hayles believes that CMS enables us “to break the transparency of print and denaturalize it by comparing it with other media forms” (8).  Hayles believes students using CMS principles can ”think creatively about the resources, approaches and strategies the problem requires” (8).  Importantly, this approach will help students explore complex, real world, problem based inquiry unlike the content driven structure of existing English programs (9).  As forms of reading change, rendering traditional close reading techniques obsolete and there is little transfer between “leisure and classroom activities,” CMS affords a meta-lens to consider these growing differences in form (11).

At Hunter, instead of CMS, we are expanding the rhetorical content in our courses.  We are also thinking a lot about transfer, asking students to experience composing in different modes and then consider those experience through the lenses of different composition and rhetorical theories, a reflective meta-approach that we hope will promote transfer across contexts, genres and forms.

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