Abstract

While many academics bemoan the numerous hours students spend with Facebook and MySpace, with YouTube and various RPG’s (role-playing games), they rarely offer an alternative, a way to channel some of the energy and excellence students devote toward these social pursuits into their academic work. Thus, while new media scholarship is increasingly rampant, a concomitant pedagogy is far less so. We must find a pedagogy that incorporates student production of new media, while it also demands intellectual rigor. As a remedy, I want to use new media to effect a sustained reading of my student’s multimedia projects, particularly for a course I taught for two semesters called “Multicultural America.” These pieces blend research and autobiography as students struggle to reconcile their own idiosyncratic experiences of the world, with the larger structural forces of racism, sexism, classism, age stereotyping and the like. These student projects combine the personal and the political—the identity politics, in other words—of life in the highly mediated 21st century. As such, they can offer both a view of the potential for multimedia in academic settings, as well as a blueprint for future work on student engagement in the university classroom. The “reading” I will conduct will be informed by the disciplines of both cultural studies and new media. Most importantly however, the student projects will not be either appropriated or denigrated by me: that is, they will be shown in their totality and this is only possible in such an environment at that offered by MediaCommons.

Full Proposal

In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks comments on her current recognition for “insurgent intellectual practice” (11), asserting that long before she was well known as an intellectual, she was widely known in her classroom, by her students, as a teacher who tried to create a “dynamic learning experience” for students as well as herself (11). With evident sadness, hooks recalls the way the academic public at her lectures is often surprised to hear her speak intimately about teaching and says that many people were particularly shocked to hear that she was writing a collection of essays about pedagogy. hooks laments the fact that academics fail to discuss their work in the classroom, an enterprise that occupies so much of their professional efforts.

This seems especially true in the case of multimedia literacy. While many of my colleagues (myself sometimes included!) bemoan the copious hours students spend with Facebook and MySpace, with YouTube and RPG’s (role-playing games), they rarely offer an alternative, a way to channel some of the energy and excellence students devote toward these social pursuits into their academic work. Thus, while new media scholarship is increasingly rampant, a concomitant pedagogy of new media is far less so. On the other end of the spectrum, game studies folks such as Mark Prensky (Digital Game Based Learning, Don’t Bother Me Mom—I’m Learning) argue that we ought to approach nearly all learning with games. But this tack, while interesting in its ability to draw adolescent boys, is, finally, not a solution the university is likely to adopt anytime soon, nor does it take into account the increasingly prevalent non-traditional student body.

I propose a partial remedy to this situation: I want to use new media to effect a sustained reading of my student’s multimedia projects, particularly for a course I taught for two semesters called “Multicultural America.” These pieces blend research and autobiography as students struggle to reconcile their own idiosyncratic experiences of the world, with the larger structural forces of racism, sexism, classism, age stereotyping and the like. These student projects combine the personal and the political—the identity politics, in other words—of life in the highly-mediated 21st century. As such, they can offer both a view of the potential for multimedia in academic settings, as well as a blueprint for future work on student engagement in the university classroom. The “reading” I will conduct will be informed by the disciplines of both cultural studies and new media. Most importantly however, the student projects will not be either appropriated or denigrated by me: that is, they will be shown in their totality and this is only possible in such an environment at that offered by MediaCommons.

The one aspect of my born-digital dissertation that I was not able to enact adequately is including the many multimedia pieces that my students have created over the last few years of my teaching career. The problem was material conditions—I did not have a way to import these pieces in order to carry out a sustained “reading” of them, in a way that would not either appropriate or denigrate their work. In other words, I wanted their work to remain front and center.

In this way, I hope to use a reverse pedagogical engineering and take students’ final projects as the starting point, and then develop (or update, actually) a pedagogical plan based on their strengths and weaknesses. There used to be a gap between theory and its practice, particularly in the classroom. However, given the way that emergent technologies are evolving, academics no longer enjoy the luxury of time. When teaching with emergent technologies, this situation worsens since this work requires an inordinate amount of time and energy. Not only does a teacher have to keep up with the latest software and hardware—in the past five years my campus has gone through three different prefabricated web class environments while protocols for class reflectors change almost yearly—but she must always have an alternate plan for each and every class period in order to allow for frequent technological malfunctions and incompatible program issues. Further, planning courses at the curricular level in terms of texts, projects, in-class activities, homework, et cetera, is impossible without considering a potentially broad range of student technical abilities. Even as the hype surrounding emergent technologies suggests that today’s students run digital circles around their ill-prepared professors, this has never been the case in my classroom where I continually encounter students with widely varying levels of technological prowess. It bears mention that the digital divide addressed by so much early scholarship in the field (Apple, Selfe & Hawisher, Selfe’s 1998 C’s keynote) has not disappeared and, in fact, threatens to become wider than ever. Aside from the ethical issue this divide raises for the academy, a material feature inheres in contemporary classrooms where students from less affluent high schools lack training that privileged students are given, and then are left behind again in college due to their lack of foundational technological knowledge. Teachers must either settle for such inequity or spend their time trying to bring the less skilled students up to speed.

Digital technologies reconfigure what it means to write in the 21st century, and students desperately need considerable engagement with the digital artifacts these technologies produce. We all require a critical vocabulary as well as solid strategies for comprehending the meaning that pervades the films, videos, and web casts that surround us, including the ubiquitous advertising that saturates our world. But we must also understand the processes by which these “texts” are produced and disseminated. In other words, both teachers and students need to be savvy readers of media-rich texts, be skilled at producing them, and be cognizant of the ways in which the underlying bias of software programs influence these texts’ creation and dissemination. To this end, I have never taught a class that does not include some “online” component, be it discussion forums, email reflectors (or “listservs” as they are sometimes called), or simply internet-based research.

My research and teaching, paired with the vast transformations in technological innovations over the last few years, has only strengthened my resolve about the need to foster digital literacy, while also convincing me that visual literacy is an absolutely crucial consideration for any teacher interested in preparing students for the world they face both inside and outside the university classroom. Gregory Ulmer argues that digital technologies are inherently image-based and I subscribe to this belief, while also noting the potential for sound, although aural work is decidedly outside the purview of this project. As the prominent scholar and cultural critic bell hooks maintains:

All colonized and subjugated people who, by way of resistance, create an oppositional sub-culture within the framework of domination recognize that the field of representation (how we see ourselves, how others see us) is a site of ongoing struggle.
The history of black liberation movements in the United States could be characterized as a struggle over images as much as it has also been a struggle for rights, for equal access. To many reformist black civil rights activists, who believed that desegregation would offer the humanizing context that would challenge and change white supremacy, the issue of representation—control over images—was never as important as equal access. As time progressed and the face of white supremacy has not changed, reformist and radical blacks would likely agree that the filed of representation remains a crucial site of struggle, as important as the question of equal access, if not more important. (54)

During the research for my dissertation, I uncovered three somewhat discrete stances that characterized the approach to visuals in the field of rhetoric and composition studies: the print-based, the hybrid-based and the image-based. I initially saw these approaches as being progressively more enlightened, suspecting that, after a sustained analysis, the image-based stance would turn out to be the most viable approach, the one that I would see as perhaps not immediately viable due to material constraints and institutional resistance, but would, nonetheless, represent the ideal approach worth striving for. But this hypothesis was flawed and I discovered this in both theory and in practice. I carried out the work of my dissertation project while simultaneously teaching experimental classes in which I employed and tested its theories. These courses both informed and were informed by the intellectual work of my dissertation creating a symbiotic relationship that proved to be incredibly rich and productive. I began to see the value of all three approaches and I believe they are all necessary avenues for acquiring the sort of multiple literacies necessary for successfully negotiating the world of today as well as tomorrow.

Although I’ve taught many courses that incorporated new media (Writing In Cyberspace, Media Literacy) I want to devote significant effort to analyzing the work from Multicultural America. For if my guiding principle is that visual literacy is integral to education, and indeed to life in the 21st century, then the litmus test of that resolve comes by way of classes that are not explicitly concerned with literacy or visuals, classes that might very well proceed without including such visual projects. And yet after teaching Multicultural America during both semesters of the 2004-05 academic year, I am convinced that my students could not have met the course goals without completing this visual work.

My proposed project will consist of two parts. To begin, I will offer a narrative of the evolution of my visual assignments from many other classes and what I learned from those in terms of teaching critical visual literacy. I will establish the theoretical basis for my pedagogy in some detail. From there, I will analyze several student multimedia projects, completed in TK3, the precursor to Sophie. I will assess the extent to which these projects meet some or all of the course goals, which are:

I. Reflect critically on our own cultural identity and background, connecting personal history to larger social and historical forces.

II. Distinguish between individual bias and structural oppression, with analysis of specific examples involving diverse social and/or cultural groups.

III. Demonstrate a multicultural understanding of artistic works or performances through an ability to analyze and appreciate works from distinctly different cultures and traditions.

The next portion of the project will speak to genre. How did students negotiate the medium in which they were working and how did they handle the interplay of image and text? This section will be informed by genre studies as well as semiotic theory. Indeed, very few models for student projects exist (which is one of the reasons I see the vital need for this project) and, when they do exist, they typically call for students to create an argument. Certainly the genre of argument includes far more than this reductive type of pro-con utterance that I am assigning it here, but while the genre is sometimes regarded in all its complexity when it comes to the language of words, whether oral or written, when it comes to images, it seems that argument is inevitably equated with advertisement. And teaching students to produce advertising is decidedly not what I hope to accomplish. But this view of images as argument is also problematic because it applies a print genre to the language of pictures, and I suspect that this act will ultimately result in closing off the possibilities for image work.

The results of this project, I hope, will point toward a pedagogy of multiliteracy, one that may be used by teachers who choose to integrate programs such as Sophie into their curricula.

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