Entry 7

            The main theme I found in the readings for this week was how the “traditional” (or what the New London Group called “mere literacies”) composition structure limits students’ ability to express themselves through the modes and media they may have the best self-awareness over. Whether it be the visual or the aural, if a student can best express their ideas through conventions other than alphabetic text, then it is most helpful for learning if they can express themselves this way—then, perhaps, they may be able to articulate it more fully in alphabetic text to others, once they come to understand it through the mode that intuitively feels most “right” to them. This also brought up the monopoly of alphabetic text as expression (especially when Selfe describes aural vs. alphabetic cultures) and thus the only path to meaning making.

            In terms of multimodality, this week’s reading actually really helped me see the power it can communicate. I could abstractly understand how it forces students to reevaluate their thinking and expressive choices in ways that writing doesn’t, but I had yet to be moved by a multimodal piece the way I have been moved by writing—although, WSU is the first exposure I’ve had to the concept of multimodality, and before my remediated timeline, the only other projects I’ve done for WSU included drawings, which didn’t really help me express my ideas any better (or effectively) than my words can. When I first read about Selfe’s student Norris’s “Literacy=Identity: Can You See Me?” and the bell ringing and roll call being read, I could see multimodality serving to show a performance piece which highlights identity performance and resistance. Then, seeing in George’s piece the ways her students interpreted mapping colonialism, especially Deirdre Johns’s flag, I had a very powerful reaction. To me, this poetry performance and art work served as a way for me to “get” multimodality, if you will—the same way poetry and art moves me, a non-alphabetic student text can too. Perhaps this makes me sound a bit glib that I haven’t really gotten that so far, but it did really hit me this week how multimodality can be truly effective and not simply alternative or outside-the-box (as I felt when trying to draw cartoons). It made me start thinking about how I could incorporate multimodality into a classroom, especially in relation to visual and aural inundation that students today experience.

            I found the Selfe-Hesse argument to be most interesting not necessarily in what it is our jobs to do for students (to be honest, I feel like I’m seeing this every week in just about every class that approaches pedagogy), but in Selfe’s history of aural and alphabetic cultures. When she writes, “From one perspective, this process can be understood as a kind of cultural and intellectual remediation” (626), I found it to be an absolutely fascinating take on cultural artifacts in composition classrooms, especially when I then reconsidered it in light of the colonialism projects George had her students do.

            I enjoyed the George article the most this week, especially when she quotes Kehl in pointing out that some students are visually, but not necessarily verbally, sensitive (21). This made a great argument for multimodality, in my opinion. If critical thinking is the link between defining what English departments do, and students are better able to move into that critical thinking in a visual rather than verbal medium, then it makes sense to me if we have them work through it visually so that they are more comfortable inhabiting those ideas and get to know them in more detail and more self-awareness, and then make the move to having them put those thoughts, feelings, and reaction on paper.

            Yancey’s article was a bit harder for me to get into because I felt a bit ADD jumping all over the page between marginal notes, pictures, and the text (maybe that means I’m close-minded? Or maybe I shouldn’t have tried to read it before bed?), but I liked her notion that students are writing outside of the classroom, and that this isn’t unique to our generation (I hear a lot about how today’s writers write more than anyone else, and it makes me curious about the criteria they’re including for this comparison). Yancey writes, “Today, we are witnessing a parallel creation, that of a writing public made plural, and in the case of the development of a reading public, it’s taking place largely outside of school—and this in an age of universal education. Moreover, unlike what happens in our classes, no one is forcing this public to write” (300). I thought this worked really well at taking writing outside of the classroom effectively, but one thing I think could have been integrated into this article was a clear focus on how we need to teach students voice in order to work with this public, plural writing. While many people in this country are using email daily, I don’t think that means that students know how to write an email well. I’ve seen plenty of awful emails that, even though they’re writing, they need help in doing it effectively and appropriately. I would have liked to hear how Yancey could incorporate her ideas into the necessity of still needing to be understood, or achieve a certain tone, in writing that isn’t necessarily inherent to the task of writing.

            Overall, these articles were very interesting to me, especially the ones that approached multimodality in different expressive ways than I imagined it being, and the cultural implications of alphabetic texts.