Why Composition (and Digital Media)?

Alex Reid, author of The Two Virtuals (a chapter of which we discussed in class a couple of weeks ago), has a recent post on his blog about “what composition is for and why digital media is integral to it.” This post seemed to speak directly to some issues that our class has been circling around now for a few weeks: namely, what is the point of introducing digital media into a composition course?

Reid’s answer? We do it to leverage the writing (some) students are already doing:

What we can know with a higher degree of certainty is that [students] will write for online spaces. Of course this writing is often very, very short and highly informal. But it is the one writing practice they actually elect to pursue. My suggestion is that by incorporating digital composition into FYC we can make connections between their current elective writing practices and other writing practices that they might choose to adopt.

Perhaps the line between what students “elect to pursue” and school writing isn’t so easy to draw, but I thought that distinction resonated with the themes of motivation, discipline, and (dare I say it?) desire that came up in our latest class discussion. Some of us seemed to feel that moving toward new literacies in FYC is an important end in itself (as Cynthia Selfe argues in Writing New Media), while others seemed to agree with Mark Bauerlein that doing so (or doing too much of it) might lead to a loss of “slow, linear thinking.”

What I see Reid suggesting is that it doesn’t have to be one or the other. New literacies and “old” literacies aren’t (necessarily) mutually exclusive, any more than learning another language reduces your ability to speak your native tongue. Perhaps increased attention to — and practice of – any literate practices can have positive and lasting effects. The challenge composition instructors face, though, is helping students negotiate the sometimes murky waters between what Lankshear and Knobel present as two different “mindsets.”

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?

New Literacies: What are They and What Does This Mean for Writing?

What are new literacies? How do new literacies differ from old ones? How does this affect how we write and how we teach writing? To address these questions, I will examine three articles: “‘New’ Literacies: Research and Social Practice” by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, “Sampling ‘the New’ in New Literacies” by the same authors from the New Literacies Sampler, and “Looking from the Inside Out: Academic Blogging as New Literacy” by Julia Davies and Guy Merchant, also from the New Literacies Sampler.

First of all, there has been a massive proliferation of kinds of texts and textual spaces. Usually the term “new literacy” is associated with recent computing and communications technology; however, new literacy is not limited to new technology. Technological forms of new literacy, as listed by Lankshear and Knobel, include: blogs, webpages, synchronous forms of communication (chat and instant messaging), asynchronous forms (email and discussion boards), and digital multimedia forms. Other types of new literacy are: zines, fan fiction, critical literacy, memes, scenario planning (business applications, for example), and adbusting. It is important for writing teachers to acknowledge the fact that students are reading more and producing more writing, in different styles, tones, and registers and for a wider range of purposes, than ever before. Rather than dismissing texting or fanfiction as inapplicable to academic writing, teachers should show students how to translate skills they already have, for example narrative and persuasive abilities (what I did today and why we should go see this movie), into a different kind of writing. However, writing itself is changing in response to new literacies.

Confessions of a FanFic Writer, D&D Player

I am thinking of Andrea Lunsford’s guest lecture on performative text as I try to tie together some ideas that have come up after reading “New Literacies: Research and Social Practice,” (Lankshear & Knobel’s plenary address) and Jessica Hammer’s “Agency and Authority in Role Playing Texts” (New Literacies Sampler, Knobel & Lankshear, eds).

Like many children, when my friends and I were young, we entertained each other by writing stories set in the worlds of other texts, especially Star Wars, inserting each other as characters. I didn’t realize there was a term for these texts we created: fan fiction or fanfic. We spent recess at school acting out Star Wars-based stories we made up spontaneously, complete with sound effects. This too was fanfic—the multiplayer kind. As teenagers, we became serious D&D players, often playing all-night, sometimes making up our own rules, donning costumes, and running around in the woods while in character. Hammer would say we had the psychological agency (the sense that we were empowered) and cultural agency (the power recognized by others, namely our group) to exercise agency over the text (the D&D world) and the narrative (the scenario in which we played). Strangely, I was a reluctant writer of school papers, though out of school I wrote constantly in the service of my favorite texts (Star Wars and D&D).

In their plenary address, L&K discuss the growing recognition of preteen fanfic authors within the fanfic community and decry the lack of investigation of fanfic writing in the primary classroom because “it is rarely considered in terms of intertextuality, ‘media mixing’ and the like, notwithstanding the importance attached to such literary techniques within high school English classes in relation to ‘the canon.’” Consider this in light of Lunsford’s comments about the power that composition in any media can have when it is inspired. The subjects in the Stanford Literacy Study did not ask for permission to compose. They used composition outside of the class because they wished to. They exercised authority, borrowed images for flyers, integrated their words into the poem of another, and made professional-grade, multi-media learning tools.

If we accept as fact that the more literary events you engage in, the more literate you become, then isn’t it strange that we limit the variety of literary events valued in school? What if all acts of composition were at least encouraged and acknowledged? Think of the effect it might have on a student’s sense of agency and authority, as well as supporting the development of an understanding of one’s own idealogical situatedness as a writer and a reader, and general textual saavy.