Multi-Modal Frameworks
Jody Shipka has agreed to talk to us about her article in CCC on multi-modal framework approaches to composition.
First, thanks to you, Jody, for saying yes, and on such short notice, and at this time in the semester!
Second, let me say--and everyone will echo--how very much we liked your article. It's likely that it sparked the best discussion we have had all term, and we've had some very good discussions.
Third, some questions for you.
One set of questions has to do with logistics: how do you set up this kind of approach for students? How do you manage it?
Another has to do with student reaction: how do students like it? Do any of them resist?
And a third has to do with the quality of work. We liked your examples, but we wondered whether students also created examples that were not as strong. And we wondered about the grading: how does that work?
Not least, we wondered about the words--they seem to be missing in some ways. Is that a problem? How much should composition be about words, in your view, and how much about something else, and what would that something else be?
I'm sure I'm missing some questions, but these were definitely some of the most popular.
kathleen yancey
posted by kathiyancey @ 2:48 PM
11 comments
11 Comments:
Hi all--
Thanks for including me in your class! I am going to try to piece in my responses to your questions bit by bit—I’ll start with the question about student response/reaction first.
–How do students like this? Do some resist?
I’ve been pretty lucky in terms of avoiding flat-out super-hostile resistance. If students are really freaked out or discomforted by what the course requires of them, they’ll drop it. And that's a powerful form of resistance—choosing not to learn with me and others in the class.
I’ve been pretty lucky to have only had one student who battled me throughout an entire semester—the low point for me was when he turned in a statement of goals and choices that was two sentences long and basically argued that he chose to write a linear, thesis-driven essay because “everyone knows writers don’t have to make any choices when writing those.” I never understood why he didn’t drop or switch to another section of fyc. It was a long semester and I did a lot of crying when I wasn’t in class.
But to head off this kind of resistance, I make it a point of being upfront about what the classes I teach require. On the first day, I tell students that if they expect me to do all the thinking for them, this probably isn’t the class for them. I tell them that they will be responsible for determining the kind and quality of work they produce (read: this course will be a demanding one), and I also tell them that the course has been set up in ways that will, I hope, afford them opportunities to do work that is challenging, involving, and meaningful, and that will translate to other areas in their lives. (I also tell them that I look forward to learning from and with them.) This said, the student who resists the framework is basically saying, “no thanks—I’d rather not take a course that is meaningful, that translates, that is challenging or that might allow me to teach the teacher something.” And certainly, students often want me to do their thinking for them or to give them plug-n-chug kinds of assignments. Some want this because it’s a familiar practice (and so comforting in terms of knowing more or less what the teacher wants), others have wanted this because they have either wanted or felt they deserved a blow-off, easy A course—one that would allow them to invest their time and attention in the classes they really matter or that would be useful for their careers.
I also think the way students make sense of the course (i.e., the ways in which they resist, accept, or transform the course) differs a lot depending on whether or not they are required to take the course (as was the case when I was teaching fyc at Illinois) or whether it is a course in their major—I can speak more about that if anyone is interested.
In short, some students are intrigued by the course, others are wary, and still others find it really frightening to have to assume so much responsibility for their work, and to have to come up with more than one way to solve the problems the tasks present them with. Again, many of the students I have worked with have tended to expect that teachers would provide them with step-by-step instructions for what they needed to do, when, how, etc. They also tend to expect that final products (along with the processes students employ while producing those texts) will be almost identical to one another. Since my tasks are not engineered in this way, students do sit up and take notice. When they learn how other people are approaching the tasks, they often start wondering if they are doing the “right” thing. In this way, the tasks take them out of their comfort zone; they disrupt their functional systems, but I see this as a productive thing. If what I do and how I do it makes them feel uncertain, or off-balance I think it also gets them to think about, and to better articulate, what exactly it is that they expect from teachers, from writing assignments, and more generally speaking, from their education.
As an aside: Students do often describe my courses as “weird” or “not about writing.” This is odd from my point of view, since I think I am asking students to think and to account for what they do, why they do it, how they do it, when they do it, etc. Odd also since my first-year students at University of Illinois often produced portfolios that contained, on average, 100 pages of writing! Since I’ve been at UMBC, I have received statements of goals and choices that are 20-25 single-spaced pages long. Not wanting my courses to be re-presented to parents, other professors, administration, etc. in this way, I’ll ask students to describe for me writing courses that are not “weird” or that are “about writing.” What I often hear is that “normal” writing courses weren’t ones that allowed you to have fun, to think for yourself, or to produce texts that you cared about, or that you showed to people other than the teacher. Again, I think the important thing here is to make visible (and make a part of the conversation) the assumptions students bring to class about what teachers do, what students do, and how writing works.
Ideally, I want students to leave my classes being more flexible writers, thinkers and doers—I want them to be able to say, “yeah, I chose to do this, this and this BECAUSE I thought about other options and they weren’t as appealing or they would have required more time, skill, access to resources, etc.” I want them to leave the course with more questions than answers, you know? But selling this kind of flexibility, as it were, can be tough when or if students are hoping to uncover THE secret to great writing for all times, all audiences, and all contexts. If there is not ONE right answer, people tend to go in the other direction and think everything is relative and that there are no answers. So it’s a challenge to get students to see communication as alignment, coordination and negotiation. Yes, there are conventions, expectations, rules, etc. associated with a specific kind of communicative practice—even with my tasks there are elements that are non-negotiable parts of this activity system. The resourceful ones (and I think the more successful communicants) learn to read the context and to figure out as quickly as possible what is expected and where (if?) one has room to play, to innovate, to push boundaries and try to occasion change.
More soon!
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Hi Emily.
I’d love to hear more about the course you are designing. And yes, I think it’s feasible that you could create a new course and create tasks that ask students to come up with more than one way of satisfying that task, and/or that ask students to account for the specific choices they made while accomplishing those tasks. (We can certainly talk about this as some point in the future—hard for me to say how hard/easy this could be without knowing what your course will do, what your overall objectives are, what your teaching style is, etc.)
In response to how long it took to work this system out, I guess I’d say that it’s been nine years or so now and it’s still happening (if it weren’t I’d pack things up and apply the framework to another context since I get bored pretty easily). I’m still learning about the potentials of the framework, and I’m always tweaking things, changing things, trying to apply the framework to new contexts, etc. It’s not that I’m looking to make it better—I just want to see what (or what else) it can do, you know? Much of the change comes as a result of having students show me what’s possible to do with or to communicative practices. Someone might take up a task in a really innovative way (in a way I hadn’t seen students do before) and I’ll be like, “Shoot! Talk to me about how you are made sense of this—how did you get from this task to this product?” Sometimes I will create a new task based on the way students took up and transformed an old task.
Still, I think there were two key moves or moments that made me feel like I was maybe beginning to stabilize the framework, or work out the system. This all began as a kind of happy accident in Spring, 1998 (long story, but I had read Lillian Bridwell-Bowles’ article on diverse discourses in my prosem and I actually argued most vehemently against allowing fyc students to compose nontraditional looking texts, so it’s kind of ironic that I’m encouraging the kind of work I am now). For the first three semesters or so, I proceeded with caution and only allowed students to do the multimodal work for an assignment or two during the semester—the rest of the semester they had to compose linear, thesis-driven texts. It wasn’t until 2000 or so that I translated the course in a major multimodal way. Which is to say, I started giving students some kind of say in the kind and quality of work they did for every assignment I gave them—I no longer required x number of traditional-looking texts. Student could do linear, thesis-driven texts if that suited their purposes or they could produce board games, create multipart rhetorical events, etc. The other major change came about around 2002 when I started requiring the heads-up statement. It was really hard to respond to the texts students would turn in unless I had a sense of what they were doing, why, how, etc. (duh!!) The statement has changed a great deal in the past four years. It used to be done as an in-class write and now it’s a major part of each assignment. So I guess things began to feel like they were more or less stabilized by 2003.
Hi all,
I am going to try and tackle part of the assessment questions now. (Ironically, I am just finishing the draft of a new article on this very topic so it will be helpful to respond to these questions here, in this context as well!)
I guess I would say a couple of things to start:
For every task I provide for students (and this includes blackboard prompts, in-class presentations, etc.) I make absolutely clear what they need to do to earn a passing (C-level) mark for that task. Since there are many ways to approach a task (they are set up in ways that allow students to take risks, to play to their own strengths, interests, etc.) the course can be confusing or frustrating for students who “just” need/want to earn a passing mark for the class and who don’t really want to spend a lot of time thinking about alternatives, or the implications of their communicative choices. Out of respect for them and to give others a sense of the minimum expectations associated with a task, I make very clear what they need to do to earn that C. With a task like the OED, they must (at the very least) research the history and use of a work using the online OED, and they must come up with at least two ways of selecting, structuring and re-presenting (or amplifying, selectively contexualizing) that data. Three quarters of whatever they end up doing must be comprised of data collected from the OED. I also give them page (along with word number) requirements for both the final product part and the statement of goals and choices. (I give word requirements for both since not everyone will be creating a text or statement that has normal looking pages that feature 250 words per page, you know? In terms of a final product what I mean is that if a student decides to create a board game based on trivial pursuit, for instance, there will be a certain number of words featured on each card, on the board itself, and on the rules for play/directions. If he or she chooses to make this a multipart rhetorical event—one that allows him/her to integrate more data—he/she might create a more elaborate context—perhaps someone has purchased and played the game and is interested in writing a complaint letter asking for his/her money back. In that case, words would also be featured on the complaint letter, and a follow-up response from the company who produced the game. It may also be the case, in this more elaborate context, that so many people have hated the first version of the game, the company has decided to revamp the game. This kind of a re-visionary move allows students to describe others ideas they may have had about selecting, structuring and re-presenting the data in game form.)
But since the majority of students I work with do not want to settle for a C, I am often asked what else/more students can do to boost their grade. With the OED, I’d suggest using more data and composing a longer statement. When contexts are more complex, or when more data is employed in purposeful ways, students tend to have more to discuss in the statement. I urge them to avoid data dumping to create a longer final product. That is to say, a statement of goals and choices will not necessarily be enriched (i.e., students will not have more choices and alternatives to discuss) if they just cut and paste—“dump”—more words into their work. The key here is to think about what certain selections, structures, placements, combinations and juxtapositions of data may or may not afford.
In terms of good vs. not so good work, I personally tend to favor multipart rhetorical events over single texts/events. In the CCC piece, Maggie Christiano’s history project was most impressive in this way. But this was a huge, huge project involving much time, travel and resourcefulness —she had collected data in different contexts, she had the web page component, the live, breaking news story component as well as the user’s/finder’s guide for the project. In my publications, I try to shy away from providing readers with some of the incredibly over the top stuff students have done (and I’ve seen a good deal of this), opting instead to share with readers stuff that is impressive, above average. I also try to show the various ways in which students have thought to approach the tasks. What I like about the multipart events is that they tend to allow/require students to orchestrate more kinds of different stuff—in so doing, they need to step back and think about how all these parts connect to (or complicate, alter) the whole. Otherwise put, the multipart rhetorical event forces them to consider questions about the way their primary or focal text (i.e., the text that they have devoted the greatest amount of time and attention to—maybe this is a board game or web page) might be promoted, received, used, responded to, etc., in ways they may and may not have anticipated. It tends to gets them to think about a more extended life of (or use for) their work.
This is not to say that people who produce multipart rhetorical events always or necessarily have more complex or longer statements than people who produce single texts. (I just think multipart texts are more interesting, richer, and tend to give me more to talk and think about than other texts do.) Sometimes students don’t see or account for the way the various components impact, complicate or enrich one another. When this happens, it becomes something I ask about or point out when I respond to the texts.
I’d also say this: Having done this for so many years, I see a lot of the same kinds of kind of things. Many tests, many games, many scrapbooks, many diaries and so on. Even though my initial response might be, “great, another game!” I need to remember that for students this may be a big deal, a huge step in thinking about ways arguments might be made, or more generally speaking, narratives are constructed. This said, I also try to contain my excitement over seeing something that I’ve not seen a student do before—I’ll let the composer know when they have made me see or think about potentials I hadn’t imagined before but I don’t grade students against each other in this way. Having page and word requirements helps in this way. It’s not fair, I don’t think, to award something a better grade because it strikes me as novel, or appeals to my tastes/interests (i.e., something I look at and think, “Shoot! Why didn’t I come up with that!”—being a pretty competitive sort, my first response when I see things I wish I had thought to do is usually, “thank goodness I am not another student in the course right now; I’d be really, really mad I didn’t think of that!) At the same time seeing new potentials helps me think about ways of reinventing the framework, and I often take up, tweak and alter the stuff that really appeals to me and find ways of integrating it in the course and/or in my own work.
So what is it I am looking/hoping for? In short, I hope that students are not content with doing the bear minimum associated with a task. (In a typical semester, I might only have 2-3 students who clearly seemed to strive for the C—sometimes down to the exact word requirement. If they needed 250 words for a portion of a task, they will have like 268.) I also tend to privilege rhetorical, material, and methodological flexibility. I am deeply disappointed when a student comes to workshop and says, “This is what I’m going to, this is how I’m going to do it, and this is why.” It may be a killer idea and one that students can discuss at length but given the way tasks are constructed, I want students to imagine what DIFFERENCE IT MIGHT MAKE to set other goals, appeal to other audiences, and/or make other material, rhetorical, methodological and/or technological choices. Students often resist this kind of thinking/wondering if they have been trained or rewarded for having come up with the best, right, or only answer to a communicative problem in school, and getting it done asap. In this way, the statement of goals and choices that addresses the possibilities/implications associated with various ways of re-envisioning one’s approach to the task is regarded more highly than the one that addresses the (minimally required) ways of approaching the task. In terms of the way the statement mediates my interaction with the final product (and vice versa), I also look for evidence that students have gone beyond explaining or cataloguing their choices—I want to see that they are connecting those choices to their overall goals for the piece, and for the impact they want to make on readers/viewers. In this way, I look for statements that talk about the choices made in relation to what they said in response to the first question on the statement: What specific work does this piece attempt to do, for whom, in what context(s)?
I want to say a little bit about managing this approach—specifically in terms of how I set this up for students. To this end, I wanted to share with you an activity that I do at the start of the semester because I believe it is really a key activity in setting the stage for what I expect, how we will be treating communicative practices throughout the semester, etc. (I also think it has really helped to curtail the comments about my classes “not being about writing.”)
As I alluded to in an earlier post, when students would say that my class was not about writing, what they often meant is that my courses were not requiring them to do the kind of writing (or to use writing in ways) that they typically did in other academic spaces. When asked to define what writing is, students would often say that it is: 1. something you do only because or when a teacher asks/makes you do it. 2. something that has one inch margins, is double spaced, must be proofread, is printed on white paper in a 12 point standard font 3. something you are motivated to do mainly because a grade is involved. (or else it was what Hemingway and Edith Wharton did, you know? The stuff that geniuses do.)
Given this extremely narrow conception of what is or might be viewed as writing, it made total sense to me that students would not see the words that appeared on or around their board games as writing. They didn’t see the phone messages they left for dorm-mates as writing. They didn’t see Iming as writing, or scrap-booking, or making to-do lists, or taking photos, or taking class notes as writing. As an aside: One student said that writing messages inside of greeting cards, making lists, leaving phone messages, etc. were not “writing” but “life’s necessities—something you do to help you live your life and to exist day to day.” For her, what she knew or classified as “writing” (i.e., writing linear, academic essays for teachers) had little to do, not really, with living or responding to life’s necessities.
Soooooo. What I began to do is this: Toward the end of the first class session, I provide students with the following task. (I call it the Literacy Olympics but I really hate that title—too cutesy for me—and I have long been in search of another.) I ask students to begin compiling a list of all the things they typically read and write and/or things that they know how to read and write. (I also ask them to make note of the things they do not understand how to read or write or that they have not really had the occasion to read or write.) To make sure that students understand where I am coming from in terms of what might be considered a literate practice (i.e., I am not just talking about writing academic essays or writing like Hemingway or Shakespeare), I give them some “for instances”:
I write journal articles
I write emails
I take notes in class
I write up lesson plans
I write names and grades in my gradebook
I’m great at writing to-do lists
I know how to read a clock
I know how to read body language and facial expressions
I know how to read a cook book
I know how to read a phone book
I keep a writing log
I know how to write a message inside of a greeting card
I often write my name on a table with Pledge before I begin dusting it
I have problems reading maps and writing down directions
I cannot read anything written in Russian
I do not know how to write a memo
I read fashion magazines
I scrapbook and keep photo albums
I fill out and sign checks
I read the “amount owed” on the bills I receive each month
Students quickly that it is difficult to account for all things they read and write (and for all the ways they use reading and writing) over the course of a day, week, month or even a lifetime. Complicating matters greatly are questions/conversations about whether things that aren’t comprised entirely or partially of written marks (i.e. can cooking or receiving a meal be a kind of reading or writing? Is taking and arranging photographs a kind of reading and/or writing?)
The second class session is devoted to having students share their lists, questions and concerns. (We do this as a large group so that everyone can hear what everyone else is saying.) I tell people to add things to their lists if someone else mentions something they have forgotten.
We typically begin by talking about where, when and how people learn to engage in these literate practices. (i.e., students do not typically take to-do list writing or comic book reading classes in school, so where, why and how does one learn to participate in these activities?) Importantly, we spend a lot of time talking about what makes someone average, good or excellent at these practices. If someone can claim (as I certainly can’t!) that they are good at writing directions or reading maps, what exactly does this mean—that their penmanship is great or that they don’t misspell words? Or does it have to do with the fact/evidence that people for whom they have written directions get where they are going on time and without getting lost?
When students approach literate practices in this way, the conversation invariably turns (or is steered) to the question of what reading and writing are used for, how different kinds of reading and writing are valued, taught, passed on, etc.
In terms of reading practices specifically, we talk about how one doesn’t read (or even handle) the phone book in the same way that one might read or handle an expensive looking volume of Shakespeare’s writing. To illustrate this point, I often bring in a range of social texts and ask students to read them—a children’s book will typically be read out loud and in a child-friendly voice whereas students are often hard-pressed to find ways of reading a Cute Cat calendar to others. (What does one read and how? Does one describe the photo that appears for that month or do they just read the caption? Does one vocalize the month, the days of the week or does one read the text that appears on a specific day: “vet. 10:20.”)
Again, the activity tends to get students thinking about the various times at which and ways in which they read and write. It also helps shift the focus away from what makes writing right, wrong, good or bad because students begin to understand that before one can talk about that, they need to understand the broader context: What work is one trying to do, when, how, for whom and with what mediational means. Asking students to talk about ways of writing up phone messages or composing to-do lists often reveals that there is no single, right or best way (universally-speaking) to accomplish these tasks.
What the activity also affords is this: Students have a list of communicative practices that they may refer to if they get stuck on a task. If students come to me saying that they “don’t know what to do for a task,” I’ll recommend that they approach the problem from the standpoint of what they can do (or what might be possible to do) in response to a task. If students are either interested in or comforted by the prospect of playing to their strengths and interests, they can go back to their lists and say, “okay, I have scrapbooking here, and memos, and to-do lists—I understand how these work. How might I use one, some or all of these things to respond to the task?” For people interested in taking risks with their work, or who want to use the task as an opportunity to better understand how a particular mode of communication can or might work, they might look at their list and say, “okay, I don’t know how to write up a medical report or create a blog—maybe I can explore one or both things with this task.”
Hi Forrest--
A comment and quick question (I know time is likely tight for you all and I’ve posted a lot here already, so this isn’t anything you need to respond to now or soon or in this context—you can always shoot me an email at some point in the future):
Comment: The course sound great and I’d love to hear more about it. (being kinda selfish here cause before I discovered rhet/comp, I was a lit major who loved southern lit, and I was working on a cookbook/foodways project.)
Question: I am curious to learn more about why you’ve chosen to ask/allow students to produce music, food, fiction, poetry or folk art. (oops, I guess I have a related comment/question as well): Playing devil’s advocate here: You worry that students will say your class is not about writing (and one way of addressing that, beyond pointing out all the writing that may appear on or around the texts they produce, is to have students write about the choices they have made and/or not made while composing these texts). But how will you respond to the student who imagines potentials for other final products—what if someone has a really good reason for wanting to compose a linear, typewritten essay? Or how will you respond to the students who says, “I can’t do these things, so I need you to teach me?”
Hi Stinch,
Great questions and here comes a long response--apologies again.
I will start with the final question about exemplary and sub-par work. As I indicated earlier, I kinda hold back on featuring the exemplary work in my publications and featured a range of stuff that I think is above average. Also, sub-par (failing) work is any- or everything that does not satisfy the minimum requirements associated with a task. Again, with the OED, students fail this task (produce sub-par work) if they do not use the online OED, if they do not make sure that ¾ of their work contains OED data, if they do not produce a statement of goals and choices that meets the C-level (or passing) requirements. I provide students with a good deal of freedom to choose what they do and how they do it but to keep this from becoming a free-for-all, I have expectations/requirements that are not negotiable. This is a tough thing to balance because we tend to see things in “either/or” terms: “If the teacher is not telling us everything we need to do, we must get to do whatever we want to do.” Students need to consider, I think, (as Gunther Kress reminds us) that a message, task or communicative event has two aspects that must align, at least to some degree, for one to feel that communication has “worked,” has accomplished its purpose or has been more or less successful. There’s the representational aspect (what do I, the maker of the message, want or hope to do, say or show) and then there’s the communicational aspect (this gets to accepted or expected ways of saying, showing, or doing that work with a mind toward facilitating that alignment with one’s audience/s.) I think I might have mentioned in an earlier post the student who turned in a linear essay trying to “prove” that binge drinking had increased over time (note: the task was not asking students to prove anything but to analyze, the way a person, place or thing was represented in a wide variety of sources.) For his statement of goals and choices, he wrote three or four sentences—one of which read that “chose to prove this with an academic essay form because it didn’t require him to make any choices at all.” In this case, he was too much about what he wanted to do and not enough about what I (as his primary audience for the piece) was wanting/expecting him to do.
I do receive final products that look ugly, are made partially or entirely from found things, and I even receive final pieces that appear to have been constructed quickly. (I don’t know if this is what you mean by sub-par?) Sometimes the ugliness or the unfinished-ness is part of the overall objective for the student. Other times it may have to do with not having the money, accesses to resources, talent and/or time needed to do exactly what they were able to imagine doing in response to a task. I’d rather have students imagine potentials and find ways of working around those issues then to “settle” for what they are able to do here and now. Plus, students have often found really clever ways of working around the lack of time/talent/resources issues. Many do so by creating a context for their work in which they claim to be offering a prototype or draft of their “ideal” final product. Depending on the context they adopt for their work, they might attach a memo to their work, suggesting that before this website, product, essay, or whatever is ready for public viewing/publishing the following changes need to be made—and then they’ll list them, and describe how these changes will make their work do better work. What’s important to me is that students are thinking about ways to solve a problem or overcome what they might perceive as limitations in their work. As far as re-vision goes, I do allow students the option of re-visioning their work (if I am doing a portfolio class I insist upon it given the way I handle portfolios) but the kind of re-vision I have in mind is not about correcting typos or making something better—it’s about de- and re-contextualizing their work and attending to what difference it might makes to use other materials, set other goals, or appeal to other audiences.
As far as resistant students go I work REALLY hard not to come off as though I am demonizing linear, print-based work. I mean, print-based text are also visual and students need to attend to when and why things are double-spaced, or why page numbers are used/not used, or placed here or there and so on. It matters little to me what a student chooses to produce so long as he/she can talk about how, why, when and for whom that final product is valuable, interesting, makes a certain kind of meaning, etc. Some students do get angry when I refuse to tell them exactly what to do to get an A when accomplishing a specific task. I explain that “while I could do all their thinking for them, I would really rather learn something about what they think, imagine—how they make meaning or approach tasks,” and so on.
As far as your comment about having to “beg, borrow and steal”—yes, you’ll likely need to do that (I think it’s really all of us can ever really do, although I suppose we do make these things our own when, following Bakhtin, we appropriate them, accent them, or populate them with our intentions), and it will likely mean that your approach could feel messy and disconnected. (I say this based on my own experience—I was begging, borrowing and stealing from what I read in my prosem—I’m still begging, borrowing and stealing from things I read, from conversations I have, from things I watch on tv, and from the work I see students do! I remember the first time I read Geoff Sirc’s work—I was like, “Yeah!! Sounds like what my students have been doing but how is it different, the same? etc.”)
But never having taught before I entered grad school, I felt that I was all over the place for the first, I don’t know, five or six semesters or so, but it was a really good time, a “feeling very much alive” time (or at least I can say it now). During that first semester especially it was rough. Every time I read, thought or did something new in the pro seminar, I’d get so excited, I’d want to incorporate it right away. (Not sure what students thought but I think they appreciated that I was very enthusiastic about whatever it was I was talking about!)
But seriously. I learned that I had to take it bit by bit. There was always more I wanted to do (stuff I wanted to try or to explore) but I didn’t want problems with students, I didn’t want to compromise my job or my authority with students and so on. In this way, I felt I needed to be (and still need to be) ready to explain, justify, etc. what I was doing, why and how. This is kind of messed up since people who have students learning and working in ways that are more familiar-looking/sounding don’t really need to be prepared to do that as much. (by the way, to see this point made in a more eloquent manner, if you haven’t already read Patricia Dunne’s book Sketching, Talking and Moving—sorry, I probably don’t have the title right since I student I am working with has borrowed my copy—you might check it out.)
In any case, because what I was doing with students looked, sounded and seemed weird (at least from a perspective where school is always and only about students learning from teachers and/or about ALL students having to produce linear, thesis-driven academic essays), I’ve always had to be ready with my own statements of goals and choices in case students or anybody else asked. A matter of self-preservation. Plus, I like being able to demonstrate for people how multimodal communication is not weird but the way we routinely make and negotiate meaning in the world.
So yeah—I’m not sure how helpful this is (or can really be) because I can’t really suggest how you might make these swirling theories cohere given the objectives you need to satisfy as a high school teacher. I have not taught high school and am not familiar with what you need to do/not do in order to keep your job, avoid student complaints, etc. I have also not had occasion to work much with the kind of “struggling students” you describe although I think any class provides instructors with a range of learners (as in learning types). I am struck, however, by your reference to students who are “clearly not proficient in reading or writing.” I am thinking that if you could elaborate on what is expected of you in terms of enabling certain proficiencies, it might help me get a better sense of the objectives you, as instructor, are expected/required to meet.
But yes, I am thinking that pedagogies that involve students, that allow students to think about (and critique) how they know what they know, and that provide students with opportunities to connect--or to translate, and in so doing, to transform--what they know to other/new contexts (all things that an activity-based multimodal theory of composing tries to afford students), can both challenge and “help” students, struggling or no.
Hi J.T.
No need for thanks—I am getting a lot out of this too! It always helps to have opportunities to articulate what one is trying to do, why, how, etc. So I appreciate the questions and responses as well!
And yes, grades are, and will likely always be, a huge issue. I’ve just finished a draft of an article that focuses on the heads-up statement (or what I tend more often to call the students’ the statements of goals and choice), so I’ve been thinking a lot about how tough it can be to get students to think of alternative ways of approaching tasks (even if the alternative involves two ways of composing a linear, thesis-driven essay), or to have them think about all the people, tools, strategies and environments they collaborate with while composing texts. To a large degree, I think grades coupled with the emphasis we place on efficiency are to blame. Added to this, a too-narrow conception of revision where the emphasis is often placed on perfecting, polishing and perfecting texts as opposed to seeing texts as stable- or sound-for-now (i.e., certain assemblages of stuff enable, constrain and complicate different potentials for meaning). So I think it can be hard for students understand why I am asking them to come up with at least two ways (and still more then this if one wants a better than average grade) to approach a task when they have been so often rewarded for coming up with the right, best or only answer to a problem in the shortest amount of time. If the first idea a student comes up with is one he/she likes and has been well-received by others, they tend not to want to think about how setting other goals and making other choices might impact their work. As far as collaboration is concerned, I think students “get” group work, peer workshops—that is to say, they see these as forms of collaboration but it’s been more of a challenge to get them to note and think about the various ways they collaborate—with spaces, tools/materials, their histories of learning/literacy, etc.—while producing and consuming texts.
I want to say this though as far as taking risks and grades. I think it was more difficult to get students to take risks before I really starting stressing the metacommunicative aspects of the framework and started requiring really in-depth statements of goals and choices. I worked with a lot of AP students at the University of Illinois and they had a way of writing (i.e., variations on five paragraph themes) that had served them well in high school. They couldn’t tell me what they were doing, how or why when they composed essays, it was more a case of writing on auto pilot—skating by as it were. To their way of thinking it was like, “well, if it’s not broke, why mess with it?” Students who said they didn’t write or who didn’t think they could write (read: those who had received poor grades on their writing), were more open to risk-taking. For them, I think it was a matter of feeling like they had “gotten away with” not having to produce the kind of texts they had done poorly with in high school.
Over time, the class came less about taking risks or trying something new and more about accounting for what one was doing, why and how. Don’t get me wrong—I am totally delighted when I see students taking up a task in ways other students had not imagined but I’d much rather see (yet another!) scrapbook, board game or web page (these tend to be what a lot of students choose to do) that has a really amazing statement accompanying it. I get excited when I see students making connections between, and exploring the implications of choices they make and choices that are made for them by whatever conventions are governing the contexts they have assumed for their work. If anything will be taken up, translated and transformed from one communicative domain to another, I think it’s this—attending to what counts as an option and what one needs to do to align with a specific genre or activity system. I know the student who created the portfolio bag never went on to do that kind of work again but she did have occassion to go on to write five paragraph essays (for tests and whatnot) and said that the class made her better at this because she said that she finally understood what they were both asking and allowing her to do.
Also, students know that they cannot get a good grade unless they are able to talk about how their texts work, why, for whom, etc. So it’s less about risking than remaining mindful of what you do as you work.
But here’s the kicker: What I am really hoping to see more of are fantastic, in-depth statements that accompany linear, print-based texts. (Provided, of course, that students want to explore the potentials of these kinds of texts.) As soon as I starting insisting that students compose the statements, there seemed to be much less of a desire to continue writing the kinds of texts students wrote in high school. That kind of writing seemed to “just happen” so students couldn’t really break it down line by line for the statement—doing something that others might see as radical or risky was, in many respects, easier cause they understood better the kind and quality of work those text were supposed to do. To show them how traditional-looking print-based texts might be broken down (and to underscore that they do afford writers a good deal of choice), I make it a point of sharing with my students the statements of goals and choices I have written for my curriculum vitae, course materials and the articles I am writing. I tell them that this, for me, is a kind of risk-taking because I am showing them how I think about fashioning my scholarly and pedagogical identities.
And don’t sweat the tech stuff. I think we need to keep reminding each other that shoelaces, lights, scissors, paste, etc. are also technologies. Also, if you set things up in ways that ask students to share with you details of their choice-making and composing processes, you start learning about things and/or picking up on things that you might not have if you had to wait for a class, a workshop session, or to read a book, article, or study about it.
I know folks have asked about sub-par work, and I've explained that it's typically work that does not meet the minimum (C-level) requirements associated with a task. This said, if anyone happens to belong to facebook, I currently have 46 pics of student work (mostly object-arguments and portfolios) that I've collected over the years if anyone is interested in seeing a sampling of some of the stuff that students have thought to do. (Many of my students are on facebook so it's a way of honoring former students and showing current students what kind of work might be possible to do in my courses.) I also have an album there that contains a good number of the process sketches students produced when I interviewed them about their work for my diss. (Not statments of goals and choices but interesting representations of process.)
I'd love to see whatever you can share!
ky
thanks for the great questions, and for sharing with me ideas for your courses! i'd love to hear how things develop, shift, etc. over time
and for kathi and anyone else who might be interested (whether now or later) in seeing the pics I have on facebook, here's what you'd need to do:
i have the photos currently housed on facebook and the permissions are set to only allow my friends to see the photos. you'll need to join facebook and "friend me" to access to them. I explain how to do so below. (by the way, if you choose NOT to remain a facebook member after viewing the photos, you can deactivate your account. . .then again, i think everyone who teaches high school or college should check out facebook and myspace, etc. just to see how students are interacting with/on these spaces.)
To join and "friend' someone:
1. go to http://www.facebook.com to sign up. you need a university email to do so. (i believe your university is a member of the network.)
2. Once you've joined, choose the "search" function. there's a pull-down menu there. search for Jody Shipka under "names."
3. click on "add to friends"
4. click on "add Jody to your friends"
(I will then receive an email from facebook saying that I have a friend request which I can accept or reject.)
Once you are added to my friends, you will find the link for the photo albums on the right side of the page beneath my (rather long!) profile. (feel free to look around here if you are not familiar with facebook--read the messages on my wall, check out "my friends" etc.)
The photo albums that contain student work and process study stuff are called: "decidedly not creative," "processed," and "processing."
let me know if you have any questions.
And thanks again for allowing me to join your blog talk. I really enjoyed this opportunity!
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