Computers & Composition: Teaching in an Age of Technology

Given the current events around the world as we fight to make society as a whole understand the wrongdoings against people of color and the police brutality that continues against black individuals, this week’s reading comes at a more accurate timing. James Alexander McVey and heather Suzanne Woods in their article, Anti-Racist Activism and the Transformational Principles of Hashtag Publics, analyzes the ways in which activists use the hashtag to participate and shape the rhetoric of social media platforms. 

“Hashtags are discursively fungible, exchangeable, or flexible. They must be short enough to allow users to both cite the hashtag and insert their own commentary within Twitter’s 140-character limit (”Using Hashtags on Twitter”). Hashtags must be catchy, repeatable, and abstract enough to invite a huge number of tweets, while simultaneously being clear enough about their referent to ensure conversation remains focused on the topic.”

-McVey and Woods (2)

Using this article in order to analyze Lauri Goodling’s MOAR Digital Activism page shows that the use of hashtags is extremely important in order to try and become more involved or knowledgeable in a certain topic. Going through a hashtag opens a select topic and allows us to immerse ourselves within that specific topic and even have access to participate in the conversation. With Twitter’s hashtags, it is possible to link many conversations into a single category just by the clicking of that tag. Reflecting on current events, Twitter’s trending hashtags has been such a fast-paced list that chances are the top hashtags change within every hour as people are taking to the digital platform to take a stand and express their voice amidst this pandemic concerns and those who are unable to physically participate in events of activism. 

The Trolls and Haters of Media

With Twitter being accessible to all and giving users the power to amplify their voices, it is not surprising to see when trolls take advantage of the use of hashtags to try and make a voice louder. 

“Just as #HandsUpDontShoot became a rallying cry for Ferguson protesters, #PantsUpDontLoot provided a means for the formation of right-wing, racist online publics in response to the Ferguson protests while simultaneously counteracting the narrative of police racism that emerged in the wake of Brown's killing.”

-McVey and Woods (4)

It is sickening to see that those will ill intent take these powerful hashtags and mutate them into their own interpretation intend on either mocking the initial message or throwing it back in user’s faces with a manipulated message in response. This is where it becomes dangerous, as these altered hashtags can even prey on those who have good intentions and unknowingly have their voice fall into the wrong hashtag because the negative one was a play on words of the original. It is a cheap and terrible tactic that unfortunately proves that there is much power in social media to both the good and bad fight. 

Cheryl E. Bell, in her article Assessing Scholarly Multimedia: A Rhetorical Genre Studies Approach uses a very direct tone when approaching the topic of assigning multimedia work. Using her own experience as an educator as she assigns multimedia work to her students, she demonstrates a desire to understand what the students are getting out these kinds of assignments, placing emphasis on the reader to consider how this could be different from the traditional essay assignments. 

“The major project that I assign students in multimodal composition courses is to compose a web- text, which can include many possible genres, technologies, media, and so forth, but will always be scholarly-creative and aimed at an academic audience. I basically ask students to compose webtexts for possible submission to a journal like Kairos, and we spend the entire semester discussing the rhetorical, technological, ideological, institutional, professional, social, and other issues that arise when one chooses to undertake such a task.”

-Bell (63-64)

This approach introduces an untapped set of resources for the students, and Bell does this in a way that students are aware they have this multitude of sources to select from in order to make their webtext as visually creative as they want, but ultimately still keep in mind that this will be an academic source they are creating. By keeping that position of remaining focused on the academic part of the assignment, students are able to learn that there are way to include their creativity and unique methods of learning through this assignment while still presenting something that more or less falls into similar levels assessments. 

Traditional v. Multimedia

Looking at the grading rubric above, there is a difference between the multimedia assessment and the traditional one of an essay assignment, especially when the multimedia must now take into consideration the visual and textual and audio resources available to the students. Personally, it is an opportunity I can get behind considering the course I imagine I’d teach would encourage as much creative freedom as possible but still make it evident that the content being presented has an academic purpose and intent when it comes down to assessment. 

“One of the biggest obstacles to teaching multimodal anything to first-time multimodal authors is that the instructor may forget to get them to detail how their form and content work together from the very beginning of the process. Without a design concept as part of the proposal stage of a webtext, the conceptual core will never be realized in anything besides a paper-based, tra- ditional format that we have been trained—hardwired, it seems—to write.”

-Bell (70)

Katherine DeLuca in her topic Women, Rhetoric, and Politics on Pinterest, engages with the Pinterest social media platform and analyzes the initial purpose of the platform and how user engage rhetorically and politically with the platform. 

Of Pinterest's many users, a large portion of those users is reportedly women: "In the United States, about 80% of its users are women" (Gilbert et al., 2013, para. 5). Other reports vary in their estimates of the number of female (and/or female-identifying) users on Pinterest, reporting statistics that range from "58% to 97%" (Fehling, 2012, para. 4).

DeLuca analyzes Pinterest as a platform that is known for being very female user oriented, and although ratings do estimate a higher percentage of women using the platform, there is this assumption that the content is information on projects and resources that are feminine or can somehow only be applicable to women (which is not true). Pinterest is well known for being the go-to place for party DIY ideas, cooking recipes, and a range of homemade projects that are easily searchable and categorized by boards. 

Something More Than Boards?

A focus on the journal subject is Jane Wang’s Pinterest profile, the user described as:

Part of Wang's prominence in the online site is related to the fact that many users are auto-subscribed to follow her (at least, she is suggested as a person to follow for many users, and/or one must diligently unsubscribe from following her during the registration process or afterwards). 

Interestingly enough, when looking through Jane Wang’s profile and boards, political rhetoric is the last thing that comes to mind. if anything, it makes one think the site is a glorified cookbook with a partialness to trying to seem like Instagram. By being treated as the token account of the platform though, it acts as an example of the kind of rhetoric that one can engage in on the site as the boards clearly show a variety of different subjects and focuses offered on the platform. Moving on to the rhetorical spaces of the site, Katherine DeLuca emphasizes the statistics that do coincide with the assumption the website if more women user focused but also points out that there is a stereotype being put into place as well as stereotyping what exactly it means to have a site be feminine. 

Feminism on Pinterest

Although popular articles may still debate whether or not Pinterest is beneficial to feminism, I suggest that Pinterest is a space in which cyberfeminism can flourish in multiple forms.

I was waiting for the term cyberfeminism to turn up and was slightly surprised it took looking deeper into this journal before I came across it directly. I was especially interested in this subject as Pinterest being considered feminine could be an opportunity to bite back any stereotypes as the platform can be used to demonstrate a stance of feminism through the user friendly and open platform accessible to all. 

Some Exploration

Interested in trying to explore the political rhetoric of Pinterest, I went through Jane Wang’s profile and began scrolling through her board titles Books which essentially seemed like a Goodreads list in which it acted as a catalogue of books to recommend or remember to read for later. Taking into consideration current events, I found it interesting that this board doesn’t present itself as political when it is boards of things like home decor and baking recipes, but when expanding this board, I can clearly see the books listed here express a stance in politics and an awareness and desire to take a stand in social issues. Because Pinterest acts as a catloguing system, there is no method of explaining these boards other than a possible title and caption, but other than that it is a get what you see sort of system and I find it unique and daring when engaging in political rhetoric. 

Resources

Kairos Journal:

http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/19.3/topoi/deluca/index.html

Pinterest Boards of Books:

The prison system is system of revenge, that is something I firmly believe, especially when considering that reasons for imprisonment often don’t even coincide with the timeline of their time there. 

The U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, a rate that legal scholar Michelle Alexander notes has gone from roughly 300,000 people to over 2 million people in the penal system in less than 30 years. One of the most striking features of what has come to be called the prison-industrial complex (PIC) is the disproportionate rates at which people of color are incarcerated—in some cities, notably, Washington D.C., 75% of young black men can expect to be incarcerated at some point in their lives (8-9).

Prison is treated as a land separate of civilization in which those that fall into it are no longer deemed worthy of societal commodities, education being one of them, despite the programs that attempt to provide a pathway to those in the system. Programs such as the one in the Danville Correctional Facility, demonstrate the obstacles placed between themselves and the students. 

Luxuries

The ability to participate in educational programs is seen as a luxury in correctional institutes, when it should be treated as a right to have access to it, regardless of position in society. Comparing the cost of sustaining prisons and the education of a single student, the numbers are extreme and make one highly regard the prison system through a different set of eyes. Already in itself, there is a higher value (and financial value) placed in prison than in education and their programs, creating this barrier between these programs and the prisons as they are fully aware which has more support placed into it. 

Limitations in Resources

Meaning to have a firm hold on the everyday activities of those in the system, there is a limitation set between incarcerated student and the educational programs they are participating in under the supervision of the system. 

“Pens, notebooks, and folders must be purchased from the commissary; a semester’s basic school supplies can easily cost a week’s wages. All personal effects must fit inside a small locker in their cells, so students must jettison old school work, readings, and even books to make room for the new.”

Things such as posessing materials necessary for coursework becomes this limitation of making sure a locker has enough space to store all the necessities, and because of that restrictions, the odds of needing to remove old work to fit the new are more likely and force students to dispose of the work they have done. 

Form and Content

Looking at the article, it is clear that it is demonstrating a use of different resources from visuals to text and audio recording that were resulted from a semester’s work that did become restricted due to the system’s limitations set for the program. Comparing it to previous readings, specifically the PARS format of a classroom, it is a bit of double edged sword in which technology can be utilized to best interact with students are placed in a setting with specific limitations, but that same technology can be taken away at the blink of an eye. The format of the article itself is also an example to show the kinds of things students are capable of doing with just access to a computer and works as this (limitless?) catalogue of resources, though there are setbacks such as the EJP Library limitations of prisoners. 

Thoughts/Questions

I am not too in the know in regards to education access within the prison system aside from knowing through statistics given that higher value is placed in making the prisons these systems to maintain some sort order and less on giving these people access to resources. I suppose my curiosity also lies in how those numbers look throughout the years? Do they change for the better or worse or remain the same?

Source

What does a disability studies perspective contribute to discussions of multimodality and composition studies?

Anne-Marie Womack’s writing, Teaching is Accommodation  Universally Designing Composition Classrooms and Syllabi in perspective with the Multimodality in Motion site example demonstrate that a focus in accessibility in the classroom allow for a more welcoming classroom environment and shows and effort to trying to prevent unnecessary obstacles to the students and the educator. 

“Students today must pass substantial hurtles to qualify for accommodations, initiating a medical and bureaucratic process, undertaking extra steps throughout their educations, and possibly outing themselves as having a disability.”

-Womack (2)

it’s impossible to prevent every sort of obstacle for students with disabilities, mostly because ability is on a spectrum and no disability is exact to each other. Waiting to be told a student is limited to a designed classroom also isn’t ideal, especially when said students likely have experience having to communicate about the limitations they have in the classroom and it resulted in an uncomfortable or undesirable outcome. By keeping in mind that the course should be as accessible as possible while designing the class syllabi, it can prevent the possibility of issues or difficulties for any student in the course. 

What are some activities and/or practices that would make our classrooms more accessible? What would you change about classrooms to design for access?

Applying my interest in comic books and visual rhetoric, when designing my syllabi I should consider that there may be students that are unable to interact with the content the way I would or expect. When I was a student taking a course on comic book and visual culture, I had a peer who was unable to participate in discussion of color palette in visual aids as this person had been color blind since birth. The professor didn’t change the content itself for the discussion, but she did adjust the discussion question from what is the color palette doing to what is the content doing when looking at it with a lack of color.  This is something I like to keep in mind in designing my ideal comic studies course. Although I’d love to incorporate all the most colorful content possible, I think it’s important to include variety in all aspects of the content which means including titles that are colorful, text rich, low in text, and in black and white. It doesn’t eliminate the issues that students like my peer had faced, but makes it so the course is as accessible as possible for students. 

Yergeau et al.: What is the relationship between the form and content? How does the form (what the article looks like) contribute to the argument? Think about the non-linear ways you can move throughout the text. Did any of you read it this way?

“Even though learning requires that material be accessible to students, educators often assume that making material accessible to disabled students threatens academic rigor.”

-Womack (4)

The form is working to make the content user friendly, it is demonstrating the argument that accessibility can be focused on during the designing process of the content itself. 

How can an educators consider accommodation without feeling as though they are overdoing it? 

I tend to be the kind of person to overthink things, so while I do want to be as accommodating as possible to my future students, I don’t think it’s ideal to make it so that worrying about any limitation could make the course not challenging enough in parts that necessary or feeling as though no syllabus is actually unrestrictive to the students. 

How can visual courses be accommodating to students? 

Given the struggles everyone has face during the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become evident more than ever the importance of understanding the technology we have access and how to best utilize it to suit our needs. Educators, if not already immersed in the use of technology in their teaching methods, are forced to learn how to use their resources to best express their teaching pedagogy while keeping in mind that every student is now no in a single classroom. Personal, Accessible, Responsive, Strategic: Resources and Strategies for Online Writing Instructors by  Jessie Borgman and Casey McArdle touch on the topic of educational intention and the conversion between the teaching and resources available to them. 

“But there is a different between putting content online and teaching online.”

-Borgman and McArdle (3)

P - Personal

Despite having the creative freedom to express yourself through technology, it can be increasingly difficult to fully express your personality to your students when they are unable to interact with you in person. It can be especially frightening from the student’s perspective if they can’t apply a face to the words they are intaking, they could potentially fear the educator believing them to be strict or unapproachable if their style of communication is very bland or textbook style. 

“It’s incredibly important to be personal and show you students who you are and that you are there in the online classroom with them; that you’re part of the experience with them.”

-Borgman and McArdle (18)

Students (regardless of their age and level) most often forget that their educators are people too and may also be struggling through the online learning process and are not even aware that there is a problem in the communication between student and teacher. While there is no complete way to keep students from feeling this way, it can be slightly lowered in chance on the educator’s part by taking into consideration the way they present themselves or if they express themselves at all in their online classroom. Taking my own potential classroom as an example, I am particularly interested in the composition and rhetorical analysis of comic book visual culture and literature; applying this topic of interest into my classroom online will not only give my students a unique perspective of application in the content, but also gives the students an idea of my personality, particularly the part that is a huge comic book and video game geek. Incorporating my interests makes it so that I appear more approachable and that the content the students are interacting with can show them that the application processes they are experiencing can be taken into other forms of visual culture outside the classroom. 

A - Accessible

When teaching an online course, it needs to be taken into consideration that students may have different methods of accessing their virtual classroom. When the student is enrolled, it can be assumed that yes, the student does have some form of access to that online classroom, but that doesn’t mean they have the resources to have access to everything you would like to use throughout the course. 

“It takes time to learn about creating accessible materials for students with diverse abilities and it takes time to create an online course that means the needs of a diverse student population.”

-Borgman and McArdle (36)

Using my comic books and composition course for example: I assume that all my students were to have access to a google drive where I would have them access the comic book titles we will be reading and analyzing. Well, what if two students out of my thirty (plus) students has access to the drive on their cellular devices but the PDF files are too large for them to be viewable on a mobile device that is their primary resource to access the classroom? That means the course content is not accessible to all your students. Well, then I could send the students the direct PDF file or split it into two smaller files. It may seem like a small setback but it can cause extreme stress and anxiety for the students who don’t have access to content while their peers do. 

R - Responsive

Being present in the classroom isn’t enough to create the best online classroom possible. Along with said presence, there needs to be a steady flow of response from the educator to the student, either individually or as a whole. These can be done in the form of commentary to given assignments, email communication to the class, and generally being open to discussion with the students individually. 

“One of the joys and downfalls of teaching online is that the course is always available and students always need a response to some question.”

-Borgman and McArdle (52)

Educators can still schedule things like office hours in order to make their time remain balanced and still give student opportunity to communicate, but then that can contradict with the accessibility as well if students are the ones unavailable during your open office hour times. It can become a shaky line between available and unavailable and responsive and unresponsive. I believe it is necessary for the educator to leave commentary on student work, regardless if it is a sentence long or a paragraph long so long as there is a clear indication that the instructor is responding to the work of the students. 

S - Strategic

This part of the PARS method is one I believe completely differs depending on the educator and their ideal classroom. Taking my own ideal classroom of the comic book and composition course into consideration, I imagine an online classroom designed to be interactive with resources that allow students to feel a creative freedom of expression. If someone’s idea of an online class is more by the book then obviously their design wouldn’t look like mine. This strategy is also dependent on the PAR concepts as the overall design depends on what your views are on the others. 

Overall Thoughts

Adam Banks in his book Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, the idea of African American rhetorical tradition is brought into light through a remixing of form and language. He argues that traditional programs of composition are doing a disservice to the black student population as a restriction of traditional narratives. It also disservices all students in general as limitation of form and new media integration prevents them from achieving a sense of individuality in the writing and media form. By taking a book and formatting into something that isn’t a book but a remix, he is demonstrating through firsthand knowledge the freedom being given to those who are able to use their culture’s narratives through method of storytelling. 

“This book looks to cratch, to interrupt, to play a while in the grooces of two records -- disciplinary conversations about African American rhetoric and those about multimedia writing -- to begin to blend and loop them while posing one question: how can African American rhetorical traditions and practices inform composition’s current endeavors to define, theorize, and practice multimedia writing?”

-Adam Banks (2)

Banks’ format of the book goes to show how traditional writing forms can be remixed (quite literally in this book’s case) and absolutely do something beyond giving written statement or opinion. It honestly feels like the book is an example not just to those who would like an example of remixing narratives being successful in the classroom, but an example to those who naysay it. In a way, it makes it impossible for the naysayers to deny it being a possibility with this product as prove (though it definitely won’t change the naysayer’s minds completely if they are so adamant with sticking to the traditional writing program).

“In fact, let me just say this now for the record: at this moment in 2011, anyone still attempting to argue that Ebonics is a problem for black students or that it is somehow connected to a lack of intelligence or lack of desire to achieve is about as useful as a Betamax video cassette player, and it’s time for those folks to be retired, be they teachers, administrators, or community leaders, so the rest of us can try to do some real work in the service of equal access for black students and all students.”

-Adam Banks (15)

I’ll be frank in saying that the visual you see above is a perfect representation of my reaction after reading Anne Frances Wysocki’s, Opening New Media to Writing: openings and justifications. It wasn’t so much as confusion as it was I got so caught in the things said that by the end I was left unsure if a solution or opportunity had actually been presented in the theoretical ideas Anne Frances Wysocki was giving. I have my issues (really only one issue that breaks into smaller ones) but I will leave that for after my breakdown of some of the points she makes that actually stuck with me for the rest of the chapter. 

“I want to consider how any material we use for communication is not a blank carrier for our meanings, is not a blank that contributes nothing to how readers understand. Instead, I believe that we have a time of opening here, a time to be alert to how these choices of material very much articulate into the other structures that shape writing and our lives - and that being alert to these choices can help us shape changes we might want.”

-Anne Frances Wysocki (10)

I initially disagreed with her claim that platforms are not neutral carriers, as I firmly believe that platforms carry a certain within themselves when being opened to their user whether it turns out that way or not. Reading further with what she meant I found that she presented a very valid point in that the content being produces by us, the users, has a heaviness to it, a weight that prevents these platforms from being neutral carriers. In a way, she is giving more validation to the users of these new media platforms than the actual platform itself, which I still am not sure how I feel about that but still found I generally agreed with what she was indicating here. I believe that any media platform or tool of creation of any medium is capable of being used in an academic setting so it isn’t that hard for me to hop aboard the bandwagon here and simply shake my head to this. This is a topic I wouldn’t usually think about giving an actual reason for supporting, for instance if I were to teach a composition course and incorporate the constructive choices of composition in tweets which have a limit to what can be said, I wouldn’t have a strong response if asked why exactly I find it important to use such platforms. Wysocki’s response above is definitely something I could get behind despite my slight confusion as to the route she is taking the rest of the chapter. 

“Our particular technologies do matter, and we do need to attend to new technologies and processes--because these technologies take shape in context of everything else that matter to us.”

-Anne Frances Wysocki (19)

What I got from this was the encouragement to place (or be aware) of the values of various forms of new media and technologies within and outside the classroom setting. When applying new media platforms to an educational setting, it shouldn’t filter the technology as being solely committed to an educational concept but to be aware and cherish the fact that this platform is something that is accessible and impacting beyond what it is being used for in the class. And despite a single new media being used by multiple people, no product will come out the same and the diversity in that alone should have a special kind of value places on it. 

Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes in their book, On Multimodality: New Media in Composition Studies touches on the topic of debate: Can new media be taught in a usual traditionally led classroom of English? The question so much isn’t as directly asked as it is thrown up in the air as something to hold on to as Alexander and Rhodes walk through the ways in which traditional and new methods of teaching may clash and if there needs to be a path opened for a new method of teaching to break through and lead in an age of technological sophistication. 

“...when we focus on print alone as the communicative venue for our assignments and for students’ responses to those assignments, we ensure that instruction is less accessible to a wide range of learners, and we constrain students’ ability to succeed by offering them an unnecessarily narrow choice semiotic and rhetorical resources.”

Alexander and Rhodes (1)

This book is in response to the method of teaching traditionally and the ways it is or may clash with new methods of teaching with new media being used as a medium and untapped source of material in the classroom. The authors are evidently leaning toward the side arguing for the use of new media and the introduction and first chapter act as a step into a much larger discussion about new media in teaching composition, though the second half of the book (based on my cursory overview of it) doesn’t appear to provide any real response to how new media can actually replace the traditional rather than transferring the old into the new. Despite it being an entire book, the content it discusses is really only a scraping of the surface of a much larger discussion that remain ongoing as technology continues to advance and the classroom is beginning to see its incorporation being mixed (or tangled) with the traditional. 

Alexander and Rhodes incorporate other scholarly texts including, Anne Fraces Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s, “Blinded by the Letter” in which the two scholars put on the table the argument of there being a different between extension and exploration of new methods. It is easy to simply agree with new media being necessary in composition teaching and then view it as a branch to add on to the traditional methods, though it then becomes this narrow pathway that is being swallowed in with the old way. On Multimodality touches on this question for the majority of the book and to further the questioning into a potential answer (or set of opinions set by the authors). 

Scholar Jason Palmeri is also mentioned in the introduction of the book as an advocate to the transition between traditional and new media in composition teachings. 

“Palmeri advocates for a ‘pluralist vision’ of composition studies that acknowledges how our field, at least since the 1960s, has always been engaged with multimodality, so the leap to multimedia should not be a large one, conceptually.”

Alexander and Rhodes (5)

Although agreeing with Palmeri’s advocacy for new media in composition studies, Alexander and Rhodes do not appear to stand by the conception of that leap to the use of new media as something not large. Rather, is seems they believe it is much larger than believed considering the path to opening to a new method of teaching outside the traditional as being anything other than a small step. To step away from alphabetic writing is an extremely difficult thing to consider especially looking at first year composition students who, at this point in the argument, may be quite far from even being able to see a classroom setting encouraging new media. It becomes necessary at that point, to emphasize knowledge of the traditional before being able to incorporate(or explore) new media into their studies. 

Question: How can we best prepare our students (and ourselves) for rich participation in this complex public sphere they identify?

It is a heavy question, that personally, I don’t believe has an answer powerful enough to step up and make the structure of teaching traditionally reconsider the ways new media is brought into the classroom. I agree with Alexander and Rhodes’ thoughts on keeping first year composition students on a traditional path of alphabetic writing as to beginning a shift to a new media rich platform means they need to at least have firsthand knowledge of the traditional. Beyond a first year composition course I think it becomes this gradual introduction to new mediums that students can eventually find comfort in using. Speaking from personal experience, it is overwhelming having this sudden access to untapped platforms and resources that go beyond the traditional - from there it also becomes this uncertainty as I would try to turn this five page paper into a five page paper that is converted onto say, a podcast through speech rather than beginning with a podcast platform and creating content. Identity then is another sense of uncertainty as students may have in their entire secondary school education been taught to minimize their personal input on their school topics when it should be the exact opposite. To answer the question as much to my knowledge, I believe that giving students the freedom to learn about their identity and how these media platforms can help them express themselves is important as once they are given a topic to discuss or interact with, it becomes less guess work and more successful interaction between students and content.