Tech Camp 2010

Wysocki, Ann Frances. “Opening New Media to Writing: Openings and Justifications.” Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition, 1st ed. Wysocki, Ann Frances, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc (Eds.). Utah State University Press, 2004.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Writing in the 21st Century.” A Report from the National Council of Teachers of English.

Lovett, Maria, Katherine E. Gossit, Carrie A. Lamanna, James P. Purdy, and Joseph Squier. “Writing with Video: What Happens When Composition Comes Of f the Page?” RAW: (Reading and Writing) New Media. Ball, Cheryl E. and James Kalmbach, (Eds). Hampton Press, March 2010.


Based on the three readings assigned for Syracuse Writing Program’s Tech Camp 2010, I was struck by the common argument insisting on the production of new media in the composition classroom over the (perhaps) more commonly adopted strategies of analyzing new media or applying new media to traditional print forms of writing. Lovett et al. made a strong argument for considering the production of new media texts in their “Writing with Video: What Happens When Composition Comes Of f the Page?” They assert that “When students become producers rather than simply consumers of new media texts they gain a fuller understanding of the ways in which new media shape how writers structure, organize, understand, and evaluate information” (5). For me, this seems an exciting way to facilitate classrooms where students are more active in their educational pursuits rather than passive consumers of it. Plus, students already come to the classroom with a range of new media literacies, literacies that hold weight in the ever growing image-driven world, as Lovett et al argue. The authors also point out the agency students already hold when entering the classroom, a writerly authority that should be fostered and upheld rather than dismissed or discouraged: “Students are experts of their own experience and educational pursuits, and when given the opportunity, they are often eager to share what they know. The course encourages students to demonstrate new technologies they are using, such as podcasting or sound editing techniques” (16). It seems new media fits in well when taking a more student-knowledge-centered approach.

Just tasking students with producing new media, however, is only a part of the calls for using new media in the writing classroom. As with any composition, textual or digital or otherwise, it’s important to acknowledge the social and political and material contexts, possibilities, and constraints. In Anne Frances Wysocki’s Introduction (“Opening New Media to Writing: Openings and Justifications”) to her coauthored book, Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition, I was immediately interested in an early acknowledgement to the “materiality” of new media texts. The term and its multifaceted definition are taken from Bruce Horner’s Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique. The “materiality of writing” is described as referring to “socioeconomic conditions”; “networks for the distribution of writing, controls of publishing (in whatever forms), and global relations of power articulated through these”; “particular subjectivities”; “social relations”; and “the materiality of the work of teaching composition” (qtd. in Wysocki 3-4). For me, through recognizing what material restraints and possibilities come from producing new media, it seems as though students would simultaneously be analyzing and applying new media to their writerly tasks. Through even blogging, for example, participating writers might be privy to considering what material constraints and possibilities are evident: the labor involved; the technological access, knowledge, and skills required; the rhetorical power of content design and architecture; the political and ethical implications of arguing something publicly; the social implications of speaking to certain local and global audiences; the legal implications of borrowing words and images and ideas from other texts; etc. The materiality of writing as is described by Horner and summarized by Wysocki, then, seems an important aspect of teaching with new media that deserves careful attention from instructors. Using a blog as a means of writing in the classroom just to use a blog is a step, but I can imagine a much more fruitful and critical approach would be to consider as a class the material aspects of this kind of work.

I’m fairly convinced. My immediate concern, however, again goes back to the frequently posited questions we hear whenever calls for adopting new approaches in composition courses are made: How might I, the instructor, negotiate the inclusion of new curricular assignments and outcomes when I’m already pressed for time as it is? Should I eliminate other practices to make room for more of a focus on writing with new media? Just because I add in a component where students analyze, apply, and produce new media, wouldn’t it be naïve to assume that students will garner a better sense of purpose in their writing? These were concerns articulated numerous times by numerous writing instructors during Tech Camp.

This last observation—that which read: Just because I add a component where students analyze, apply, and produce new media, isn’t it naïve to assume that students will garner a “better” and more “organic” purpose in their writing?—is of particular interest to me. Yancey’s NCTE report, “Writing in the 21st Century,” attempts to contextualize, I think, some of the historical reasons for why students may not treat writing experiences as organic processes within composition classrooms. Yancey suggests that writing has historically been treated as a “rudimentary skill” or as a having the “predominant role in the testing of students” (3). Yancey offers a few broadly described goals in her disciplinary call for writing instructors to pay attention to the rise of new media and visual argumentation in the classroom, attention leading to new curriculum and pedagogical approaches. Perhaps because her focus was different and perhaps because of the minimal space she was afforded due to the nature of the genre she writes in, Yancey does not provide her readers with strategies or theoretical frameworks to guide instructors’ implementation of new media approaches to composition. I was left wondering, then, how students have responded to producing new media in the comp classroom. Do students really walk away feeling as though they achieved a more meaningful purpose than they would when writing more traditional print-based texts? It seems taking Wysocki’s argument for acknowledging the material constraints is a step towards tailoring assignments so that they speak to more organic rhetorical situation. Still, I can’t help but suspect that no matter our commitment to designing assignments for students in hopes of creating more organic writing experiences, it’s us still designing them. Students are still complying with our agendas. Students are still writing for a grade. Students are still concerned, therefore, with the “rudimentary skills” their instructor will assess by. Since a grade is attached to their performance, writing in the composition classroom is still rooted (as it has been historically) with testing. I wonder, then, if my struggle with interrogating this issue of “organic” writing has more to do with assessment practices than with students producing new media in the classroom. I am by no means trying to argue that there’s an easy way out of this dilemma. We teach in the university and grades and assessment come with the territory. I suppose I’m just compelled to complicate the issue a bit more based on the materiality of writing, as Wysocki suggests, and situate the issue within the politics of assessment and education more generally.

I’ll end here with a return again to Horner, as cited by Wysocki. I think I do this in attempt to offer some personal relief for the complicated questions that remain unanswered for me (and for many instructors, I imagine). While we may aspire to consider at all times the materiality of writing, it was a relief to me to hear of Horner’s recognition that “no representation of teaching or writing can exhaust the full range of their materiality” (xix, quoted in Wysocki). By recognizing that writing classes sometimes decontextualizes writing and, damn it, it’s ok that this happens, then it seems a reasonable task to also take a critical approach to acknowledging this with our students as well. At the conclusion of our time in tech camp and having considered some of the arguments of the authors we read together, I feel even more driven to have open dialogues about these issues of materiality, this being an important principle to apply to my upcoming teaching endeavors where new media practices will be more central to our writerly processes and our written products.

CCR 691: Bazerman and Prior (2003) *What Writing Does and How It Does It*

Bazerman, Charles and Prior, Paul (Eds.). (2003). What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

Executive Summary:

For this edited collection, Bazerman and Prior suggest in their introduction that discourse analysis lends itself not only to analyzing verbal discourse in linguistics and sociolinguistics, but also to research in rhetoric, composition, literary studies, and communication studies (among other disciplines). Thus, the authors attempt to combine practices from each of these fields of inquiry to catalog various research methods for scholars interested in textual analysis. They include discussions such as analysis of content, narrative works, intertextuality, code-switching, media texts, textual histories, conversation as well as the analysis of various linguistic and rhetorical features among these practices of analysis. Most chapters provide definitions, methods, methodologies, a review of literature, examples of applied analysis, practice prompts, and suggestions for further reading.

A number of assumptions ground their research methods: (a) that authoring texts is a complex cultural activity not only influenced by the author and his/her social contexts and experiences, but also other authors, other texts, genres, modes of communication, etc. (4); (b) that texts are written, visual, and verbal modes of communication that are produced through various mediums and interfaces including pen, paper, voice, conversation, thoughts, word processing tools, video, digital interfaces, and even sticks, knives, trees, and dirt (6-7); (c) that writing is a “complex literate activity that includes reading and writing, feeling and thinking, speaking and listening, observing and acting” (7); and, lastly, (d) that critical inquiry of texts is most assessable when analysts suspend judgment of what is normal and instead view all texts as being “strange objects worthy of close analytic attention” (7-8).

Quotable Quotes:

· “To understand writing, we need to explore the practices that people engage in to produce texts as well as the ways that writing practices gain their meanings and functions as dynamic elements o specific cultural settings” (2).

· What to consider when analyzing texts: “how texts direct people’s attention to various objects and concerns; how different linguistic, rhetorical, and graphic resources make possible the creation of meaning; how texts depend on and use other texts; how texts influence people’s beliefs and actions; how people learn to recognize, read, and produce genres (texts of certain types); how people actually go about producing texts; and how social systems of activity depend on and promote particular kinds of texts” (3).

An overview of chapters 1-7:

· In “Content Analysis: What texts Talk About” (13-32), Thomas Huckin defines content analysis as “the identifying, quantifying, and analyzing of specific words, phrases, concepts, or other observable semantic data in a text or body of texts with the aim of uncovering some underlying thematic or rhetorical pattern running through these texts” (14). Huckin also outlines the methodological procedures of content analysis (16-19), provides real examples of research using this approach (19-26), and assesses the approach for its criticisms and virtues (26-28).

· In “Poetics and Narrativity: How Texts Tell Stories” (33-56), Phillip Eubanks argues that the structure and function of language using narrative, metaphor, and metonymy have significant social power since these forms subconsciously shape cultural thinking and practices. Eubanks also suggests that poetic and narrative forms not only shape the writing of fiction, but also argumentative and scientific research practices. To exemplify the narrative approach, for instance, Eubanks describes his method of analyzing story-telling features in texts written by Bill gates, noting how he (Eubanks) selected texts, analyzed them, categorized his analyses, and applied narrative and rhetorical theory to make an argument about the functions of social thinking and argumentative processes (36-42). After exemplifying metaphor (42-50) and other figures like metonymy (50-52), Eubanks concludes that “studies of narrative, metaphor, and other figures are not just concurrent or collocated but inherently connected” (53).

· In “Linguistic Discourse Analysis: How the Language in Texts Works” (57-82), Ellen Barton views discourse analysis as “a method for analyzing the ways that specific features of language contribute to the interpretation of texts in their various contexts” (57). Barton explains how linguists—following various methods including ethnography of communication, interactive sociolinguistics, genre analysis, systemic linguistics, and critical discourse analysis—work to explore the ways language is structured in given contexts, analyzing the function (purpose and effects) of these structures. The chapter is divided into sections discussing and exemplifying discourse analysis used in (a) the analysis of oral-written language in linguistics and composition studies (62-65); and, (b) rich feature analysis (e.g. analyzing awkward sentences) (65-74).

· In “Intertextuality: How Texts Rely on Other Texts” (83-96), Charles Bazerman outlines terms and practices for research methods analyzing how texts rely on other texts in making meaning and posits that “intertextaulity is not just a matter of which other texts you refer to, but how you use them, what you use them for, and ultimately how you position yourself as a writer to them to make your own statement” (94). Methodologically speaking, he suggests that you (as researcher of intertextuality) should identify “why you are engaged,” “what questions you hope to answer,” “the specific texts you want to examine,” and “the traces of other texts that you wish to consider,” and then work to “[make] observations and interpretations,” “look for more subtle clues,” “make a list” and “look for a pattern” (91-92).

· In “Code-Switching and Second Language Writing: How Multiple Codes Are Combined in a Text” (97-122), Marcia Z. Buell illustrates how “Code-switching offers particularly rich insights for examination of second- (multi-) language or dialect speakers and writers who must not only negotiate across recognizably distinct languages or language variants, but also must worked through the complexity attached to learning and suing an unfamiliar set of codes” (98). Buell offers an extensive example where she analyzes a student’s essay for code-switching using not only contrastive analysis and interlanguage theory, but also using contrastive rhetoric (106-117).

· In “The Multiple Media of Texts: How Onscreen and Paper Texts Incorporate Words, Images, and Other Media” (123-166), Anne Frances Wysocki unpacks definitions of basic concepts used for analyzing various media texts, including the underlying assumptions for analyzing media texts (123-126), the “categories and terminology to use in analysis” of media texts (126-137), and a suggested “approach for analyzing the visual aspects of a text” (137-140).

· In “Tracing Process: How Texts Come Into Being” (167-200), Paul Prior discusses how and why researchers study writing processes. He defines how major concepts (like inscription, composing, text, and authorship) influence writing as practice. Methods for analysis are catalogued and include practices for “collecting and keeping track of texts,” “intertextual analysis,” “eliciting writers’ accounts,” “observation of writing,” and “integrating data from multiple sources” (172-196). Prior suggests that using multiple methods tracing textual histories (such as “intertextual analysis, participant accounts, and observation of activity” 197) will help researchers carefully consider and analyze how authorship and social contexts influence the composition of texts.

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