Week 8 - October 10th Blog Post

This Week’s Readings:

George, Diana. "From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing." College Composition and Communication 54.1 (Sept. 2002): 11-39

Hesse, Doug. "Response to Cynthia L. Selfe's 'The Movement of Air, The Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing.'" College Composition and Communication. 61.3 (2010): 602-605. Print.

Selfe, Cynthia L. "The Movement of Air, The Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing." College Composition and Communication. 60.4 (2009): 616-663. Print.

Selfe, Cynthia L. "Response to Doug Hesse" College Composition and Communication. 61.3 (2010): 606-611. Print.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key." College Composition and Communication. 56.2 (2004): 297-328. Print.

This week’s readings are very in line with my own ways of thinking and, happily, quite in line with the move of our WSU’s FYC program’s move towards multimodality. The Selfe and Hesse pieces demonstrate both the benefits of such a move as well as the potential drawbacks and concerns for those who are yet to be “sold” on the notion of multimodal work. Cyndie Selfe argues for the inclusion of aurality in the FYC classroom in addition to traditional alphabetic literacy. For Selfe, aurality, as part of a long rhetorical tradition, has a central role in the classroom as a means of recognizing multiliteracies (clearly influenced by the NLG) and to give voices (literally) to a number of marginalized groups. Once again, Selfe is at the center of multimodal discussion and, in addition to clearly influencing Doug Hesse (who directly responds to her essay), Selfe has paved the way for more multimodal publication by students and scholars such as Shipka and Lauer.

Ok, so I’m going to geek out a bit. I love, love, LOVED Cyndie Selfe’s piece on aurality. In fact, I would say that I have been “looking for it” all semester in one way or another. I’m very interested in the roles of aurality and orality in the classroom and I’ve actually recently decided to focus my dissertation on the roles of aurality and orality on commenting on student essays. Patty Ericsson recommended this text to me on Friday and, lo and behold, it was on the schedule for reading this week.

Selfe encourages compositionists to consider the importance of both alphabetic literacy and print literacy in our FYC classrooms. She is very careful to avoid exclusively arguing for any specific type of literacy but explains that there is room (and indeed, we should make room) for a variety of literacies in our class. For me, the discussion on pedagogical uses of aurality was especially useful. Selfe describes how teachers have, in the past, used technologies to provide students with an auditory “walking tour” of their essay (Selfe, p.633) from the readers’ point of view – something that I plan to expand on in terms of the impact on at-risk students.  Selfe’s larger point is that sound is undervalued as a compositional mode (p. 617 and that very little work in aurality has been done for the sake of adding to or better understanding our oral tradition. Instead, most of our focus is on using this mode to compose written text (p.634). Selfe also bemoans the lack of aural tools for teaching practitioners (p.641) but ultimately continues to argue for the employment of a variety of literacies in the classroom since, “when we insist on print as the primary, and most formally acceptable, modality for composing knowledge, we usurp these rights and responsibilities [of the student] on several important intellectual and social dimensions, and, unwittingly, limit students’ sense of rhetorical agency to the bandwidth of our own interests and imaginations” (p.618).

Doug Hesse’s response to Selfe is quite well-founded and his concerns are clearly well considered. Hesse points out that composition as a discipline has long been described as a series of literacy crises which have led to our own identity crises. If our role truly is composition on all levels (not just writing), then the political implications of professional overlap with departments like communications deserves consideration. Hesse also specifically asks whose interests composition studies should serve and he voices his concerns over the social implications on higher education if Selfe’s views are realized. In the end, he argues that “perhaps the best we can do is tour students through the taxonomy of roles, audiences, situations, affordances, constraints, and rhetoricity: a tall order for a course or two” (p.604), and that we must, as a discipline, discuss these issues of multimodality and various literacies to garner answers to the questions that he poses.

Cyndie Selfe's response to Hesse's commentary simply asks Hesse and other naysayers to

consider WHY alphabetic literacy is valued above all other literacies. She points out that much of the work that we (and our students) do today is with literacies other than traditional alphabetic literacies. Selfe goes so far as to suggest that "faculty in rhetoric and composition should serve as role models in this regard, [show] students that they, too, are willing to learn new ways of composing, to expand their own skills and abilities beyond the alphabetic by practicing with different modalities of expression that may be unfamiliar and difficult but increasingly expected and valuable in different twenty-first century rhetorical contexts both in and out of the academy” (p.608).

Diana George and Kathy Blake Yancey’s works also provide support for multimodal work in addition to a few words of caution. George advocates for the use of meaningful visual analysis in FYC classrooms. For George, alphabetic literacy stifles both student and teacher creativity in the classroom and, as a result, assignments lack interest and fresh ideas. As an element of rhetoric, George suggests that we use assignments to break down notions of high and low culture in our visually oriented society. She is clearly influenced by the New London Group's call for multiliteracies and she also influenced Wysocki et al's recommendation that teachers look at student projects with "generosity".

Kathy Blake Yancey's work "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key" was one of the first calls for multimodal assignments in the composition classroom. In this work, she encourages teachers to dive into multimodal work and to consider multimodal work as a "new key" in writing (this was also the keynote address in the 2004 CCCC keynote address). This work is very much in line with Cyndie Selfe's works, Selfe and Moran, Selfe & Hawisher, etc. as Yancey encourages the use of technology in the classroom but also cautions us against using it without being pedagogically and theoretically minded. Yancey's text clearly influenced the works of Shipka and Lauer in the ways they incorporate multimodality into their classrooms and studies. Additionally, Yancey was clearly influenced by Cyndie Selfe's earlier works in addition to Richard Lanham (whom she mentions specifically in her text).