Canned Goods

This semester Thursdays are no longer simply Thursdays; they’re Prelims Thursdays. Actually, that’s a pretty sucky title. But I don’t have time to think of a better one. Got to work on the faculty question: “In what ways is writing organized by circumstance? And how do our answers to that question impact our theories, practices, and pedagogies?”

There are a lot of ways to answer this question, and one way is with a literacy autoethnography–the kind of assignment we sometimes give our students (write about a literacy experience . . . mine usually starts with getting Ds in handwriting). It’s an idea, but I’ve written about some of these experience as reflections in my coursework. I don’t think I’ll end up going that direction. After making the lit review move (with a bunch of Literacy Studies research), I’m hoping to move into new media literacies by pulling out some Gee and the New London Group (situated learning and multiliteracies) so as to focus on the acquisition of Discourse.

One of the other moves I need and want to make is to problematize my own use of new media technology in the classroom. People are learning to work with new media technologies within social networks–Harry Potter fan fiction on Muggle.net, Photoshop image manipulation on Worth1000.com, machinima on Machinima.com. That’s what’s missing from my classroom, situated learning.

As a MA student/TA I made service-learning a part of my FYC curriculum because I wanted students to have real-world (or post-college) rhetorical situations in which to write with non-profit agencies in the community. One of the problems: Even though they had a dozen sites to choose from, they had a dozen sites to choose from. Were they interested in what any of these agencies were doing? On the rare occasion a good match was made (a mother worked with the YMCA because she was concerned that the Y and the community didn’t offer any recreational opportunities or events for teens; the age group of her daughter), there was intrinsic motivation to work on the project, and my deadlines and those of the Y were the extrinsic motivation. But most students were rarely invested in the work/writing they were doing. It was just another assignment.

So what makes these assignments, the Photoshop visual argument or the Flash juxtaposition of word, image, and sound any different? Why am I teaching Photoshop and Flash?

Gee’s differentiation between language and literacy acquisition and learning: “acquisition is good for performance, learning is good for meta-knowledge.” Ah. So my students are gaining meta-knowledge? On the surface my course may seem like software tutorials (a criticism that has been made), but in conjunction with all the readings and discussions we have about language and literacy & new media and networks, the aim of the course isn’t apprenticeship into a Discourse but rather meta-knowledge, which Gee sees as liberatory. Talking about grammar, form and superficialities is good for developing meta-knowledge but not for “getting people to actually acquire Discourses . . . .” Is meta-knowledge the best we can ever hope for in comp? Is that enough?

Maybe we need to talk about the goals we have for our Intermediate Composition courses at the next meeting of the 201 instructors. Are we shooting for acquisition or meta-knowledge? How would our approaches affect our pedagogy?