Encourage critical thinking and problem solving

What will encourage, motivate and stimulate students to become critical thinkers and problem solvers? Richard Miller’s “This Is How We Dream, Part 2,” architectural design includes “the best of humanities and the best of sciences” in one sustainable building. Miller suggests we post idea-driven documents that belong to no one on the web to show the best of what we are in the academy. We may be at a time in our collective history in which teaching courses across disciplines will best meet our students’ needs. For example, computer science programming classes, art digital media, physics, mathematics, philosophy—compositionists could choose a discipline to collaborate with based on interest or friendship with colleague(s) to bring what an instructor knows about the conversation in his or her discipline to the table for a course that incorporates a collaborative, across-discipline process. I, for one, would not want to sacrifice the connections between learning strategies and writing (Emig, CROSS-TALK, pp. 7-15). However, I repeatedly see pleasure at work in discussions of how we began and continue to incorporate computers into our lives. bell hooks writes in the last paragraph of TEACHING TO TRANSGRESS: “The classroom with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In the field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand…an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom” (p. 207).  If we, as composition teachers, do not want to step outside the border of our discipline, we still have options for interconnectivity within our community of scholars.

My argument is that visual literacy creates concepts in much the same way as writing. Sirc’s essay in WRITING NEW MEDIA argues for the use of Duchamp and Joseph Cornell’s boxes as models of “sustained inquiry” to scaffold through class members’ individual contributions to an interactive project (p. 140). Other examples of art that demonstrate concepts include: Rauschenberg and performance art. Wysocki argues for establishing a relationship to design that helps student to re-vision our relationship to it (WRITING NEW MEDIA, p. 173). Kristie S. Fleckinstein calls it “polymorphic literacy,” reading and writing that draw on verbal and nonverbal ways of shaping meaning (p. 613). I argue that both composition and visual, digital literacy instructors apply rigorous assessment and unwavering values about what it means to communicate conceptually through writing, images, and design: Look for opportunities to respond to the digital literacy infants now learn as they also begin to walk, talk, and engage cardboard picture books.

Reflection on democracy, free-mix culture, and Luddites

Using trial and error with an informal mix of ‘teachers’ and ‘learners,’ video gamers are participating in democratic learning that involves play and collaboration (Buckingham, David, “Introducing Identity,” Youth, Identity and Digital Media, Ed. David Buckingham, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008, p, 16). However, Buckingham urges us to celebrate their success cautiously because “we need to be able to evaluate information if we are to turn it into meaningful knowledge” (p. 17). That is the natural intersection teachers and schools inhabit—but teachers first need awareness of digital literacy and then to find creative ways (as many are already doing) to incorporate that into lesson plans accessible to students. As an example of “cautious celebration,” I cite a Feb. 15, 2011 Contra Costa Times article entitled “Ripple effect in Middle East” by Brian Murphy about protests in Tehran, Bahrain, and Yemen that are “absorbing” the message from Cairo. The Internet and youths changed how future presidential candidates will conduct their campaigns in the United States; in the 2008 election, young people were reported to have voted in unprecedented numbers. As I heard an NPR announcer question an Egyptian spokes person over the weekend, does installing the military in power in Egypt assure democracy? It seems that the questions for education indicate more urgently that our questions about democracy cross borders between nations and languages and have potential for creating democracy in ways beyond what we may have imagined. Encouraging students to evaluate information–to turn all the talk into meaningful knowledge to add to what we already know–is increasingly important.

But to digress a bit to consider “Becoming Literate in the Information Age” by Hawisher, Selfe, Moraski, and Pearson—in 1977-80, performance art became my art medium of choice which meant heavy video equipment, ½ inch video tape. My friend and I video taped one another talking daily for about a month and then watched what we said the next day—it was interesting to see how sometimes what I said was different than what I had been thinking and to get such immediate feedback. We used complicated video editing and expensive color copiers to make images of our 35mm slides. One of my major worries during those days was stealing someone else’s ideas—a somewhat novel idea to me today given the definition of free-mix culture. In the 1990′s at SFSU, an awakening for me were the poems of Marianne Moore, a popular icon, elder poet in the late 1960′s-70′s. She filed articles and images and was a master at borrowing phrases and images—sometimes attributing them, sometimes not. Finally, I looked up Luddite on Wikipedia and found that Ned Ludd in about 1811 objected to the introduction of a machine loom because it meant skilled artisans would lose their jobs. So, I think a worthy question to ask ourselves is what will we lose as we take on digital literacy that we either want to maintain or incorporate into digital literacy?

Digital Literacy and the Generational Gap

 

 

In reading the case studies from Hawisher and Selfe’s Becoming Literate in the Information Age: Cultural Ecologies and the Literacies of Technology, I became reflective of my own digital literacy practices as well as those around me.  The two research study participants, Melissa and Brittney, separated by an age gap of over 20 years, show the advantages of a “digital native” (someone who grew up surrounded by technology) over someone who had to acquire the skills later in life.  Both participants came to age in a time when the digital culture was undergoing a radical transition.

I can’t help but be reminded of the frustrating hours spent helping my mom on the computer.  My mom, who is part of the Baby Boomer Generation, sees computers as a foreign concept.  As an elementary school teacher, she wasn’t required to use computers for her day to day job beyond taking her class to the “technology lab” twice a week (where there was a dedicated librarian/lab technician to answer student questions and troubleshoot any network errors).  She has only recently discovered the virtues of email, but hasn’t quite mastered the distinction between the reply and reply all functions.  It was an inside joke between my brothers and sisters when our inboxes became flooded with chain letters and “true” stories verified by snoopes.com–uh-oh, mom has discovered the fwd button. I once received a panicked call from her because she couldn’t access her bookmarks, only to have to explain that bookmarks did not transfer from browser to browser and computer to computer (she was at a friends house trying to access her own bookmarks).

I find myself repeating the mantra of “patience” in my head when it comes to helping my mom navigate her computer troubles.  I’ve come to realize that maybe there is somewhat of a generational gap, or at least a gap in experience.  And it isn’t just my mom–frighteningly enough, many of her coworkers are the same when it comes to the uses of computer technology–and when I help them with a simple task like uploading a picture, they see me as a technology guru, though I am far from it.  I’ve noticed that the knowledge that many of us who grew up using computers would consider intuitive (links and search engine functions), aren’t so intuitive for people like my mom.  For her (sorry mom, hopefully she never reads this), technology is just a big enigma, shrouded in mysterious powers.

Circling back to Hawisher and Selfe article, it points out that “people are constrained by any number of influential factors: age, class, race, gender, handicap, experience, opportunity, and belief systems” (667).  How do these factors conflict with our notion about an open, universally accessible world wide web?

Integrated Consuming & Producing

Yes, I’ve resisted the idea of replacing print literacy with all things digital and I’ve resisted the notion of burdening comp faculty with new responsibilities when teaching students to compose in one medium is difficult enough (hey, I’m a pragmatist to the death), but I found Lessig’s 2007 TED talk very compelling in how he juxtaposed the 20th century as the age of consumption of media with the 21st century as the age of both consumption and production. He shows how, with access to digital technologies, young people are contributing to important conversations in ways that they haven’t been able to in the past. In effect, young people have created new ways of responding as in the video remixing he illustrates. As Lessig argues, these creative modes of composing have become the “tools of speech.”

“Reading” this week’s texts about the read/write culture that many of our students are lucky to have been born into (I say lucky as I imagine the power and potential this “participatory culture” allows), I couldn’t help making connections to the Integrated Reading & Writing program and philosophy that dominates here at SFSU as a way to teach developmental writing. At least as far as the program is concerned, post-secondary reading is a difficult endeavor and we have to teach students to be critical consumers of college-level texts while teaching them to be critical producers. A program that has expanded the domain of our comp classes here at SFSU to a focus on both consumption and production seems naturally poised to make the most of the power and potential of digital literacy.

Perhaps, our own IRW can aim for the “media convergence” that Jenkins (2006) discusses and fully embrace the potential of “participatory culture.” It seems to me that by encouraging students to be real participants, contributing on the literal and metaphorical web in ways that will reach real audiences, we will encourage our students to be better writers/producers, and the awareness of their participation in ongoing network of conversations, in turn, will help shape their awareness of themselves as critical reader/consumers. In other words, we can’t artificially separate the two halves of literacy, especially when we include the realm of digitally literacy.

Don’t panic, but the future of human existence depends on what you choose to teach in your Composition course.

I couldn’t quite tell if I was sensing a tone of excitement or panic in this week’s texts.

While I think both Miller and Yancey (CCC 56:2) make excellent arguments for rethinking and possibly expanding our practices (we already inhabit a world heavily influenced by screen literacy), and I couldn’t agree more when both Wysocki (Writing New Media) and Yancey suggest that the writing we ask students to do in school is not connected enough to their lives, I’m still not convinced that this justifies changing the purpose of a first year writing course from “writing/composing” (as Hesse argues in CCC 61:3) to “rhetoric/composing” (as Selfe does, also CCC 61:3).

I do think we should teach composition in a broader context, integrating visual arguments and the rhetoric of new media composition, but I think this has to be a different course than what is usually conceived of as first year comp. Might a certain large, urban state university in northern California change the focus of its second year composition course, currently emphasizing writing about literature, to multimodal composition? I, for one, would love to teach a such a course, but I would want students in it to have a good handle on written composition (and here’s maybe where we need to expand beyond the singular focus on the academic essay, considering that the world we inhabit includes written composition in many forms, some of them digital), so that writing can be one of many possible modes of communication for our students.

So, while I hear the new media alarm, it’s competing with others that have been going off for some time—in particular, the one screaming about the need for colleges to equip students with basic writing skills.

Video Games as an Enabler of New Literacies?

I’ve been contemplating for a while about what to write in this blog post, because I’ve been faced with a bit of a problem: in the article that I read for this week, James Paul Gee’s “Pleasure, Learning, Video Games, and Life: The Projective Stance“, Gee doesn’t seem to be talking about literacy at all, and Certainly not literacy as defined by Lankshear and Knobel in their plenary address. Their revised definition in “Sampling ‘the New’ in New Literacies” fits a bit better, but literacies as “socially recognized ways of generating, communicating, and negotiating meaningful content through the medium of encoded texts within contexts of participation in Discourses (or, as members of Discourses)” seems so nebulous and hedged as to include almost anything within its purview (4). Even working from that definition (which uses Gee’s own research in discourse theory), I have trouble finding anything that remotely relates to what I would normally think of as literacy in Gee’s chapter. The closest he gets is discussing the sporadic text that happens in between all the action in video games. That isn’t literacy, that is just playing around, right?

Position Statements, or Why We’re Full of It

The 2004 CCCC executive committee’s “Position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments” was perhaps a necessary one to publish because of the growing immersion of literacy practices involved within these digital environments. As we rhetoric-compositionists are wont to do, I’ll begin with the good I think it provides. In the San Francisco Bay Area, at the time, I remember that an online composition class or two were popping up on the schedules of local community colleges. This was a good thing because one of the philosophies that the statement advocates is for digital literacy technologies to “provide for the needs of students who are place-bound and time-bound.” Fantastic. For the full-time workers who need work no less in order to pay all the bills, or the parents who choose to stay at home to tend to their children, taking an English class towards a degree became more possible. Access is key to education, and the statement’s confirmation of such, in terms of how technology helps, is perhaps its most important message.

However, the very fact that some kind of “committee,” made of a group of eight or so scholars representing an entire education system, gets together to collectively-but-exclusively compose and publish an official statement, is an authoritarian move that does not play well with Web 2.0 and where digital environments are headed. This kind of institutional stranglehold may work with traditional concerns, such as grammar, even form and style. My cynicism isn’t directed at the competence of gatherings of great scholarly thinkers such as this bunch. A committee like this has the power to allay any major concerns of literacy issues, direct where thought and scholarship are headed, or even lead. Rather, I’m doubtful of how much control we as educators have over this new literacy. The statement was published in 2004. Since then, many changes have happened, such as the growing prevalence of Facebook and Twitter in communication and social networking, or iTunes for both entertainment and even as educational forum. Yet some things, such as Napster and Geocities, simply disappear.

What I’m getting at is that official position statements like the one made by a CCCC committee are never completely neutral. This particular one, for all the liberatory pedagogical good that it is proud in advocating, nevertheless tries to retain power by being a monolithic representation. In this regard, it fails to see that the Web 2.0 and social networking have a life of their own that, if nothing else, grows, develops, changes based on the whims of “the people.”