Teaching Composition Digitally

In “The Digital Imperative: Making the Case for a 21^st-Century Pedagogy,” Elizabeth Clark argues that composition classrooms should be resituated in “an emerging Web 2.0 culture that privileges community and collaboration” (35). In contrast to courses that consist of a “series of disconnected assignments written for a teacher-peer audience,” Clark argues for the use of ePortfolios that facilitate students’ “writing for a larger audience, participating in a dialogic community of writers, and understanding the implications of public writing” (28-31). The thrust of her argument is that emphasizing traditional modes of writing in first-year composition classrooms does a disservice to students, especially considering that so much (really, the vast majority) of written communication has moved to multi-modal platforms such as the web.

Before I start talking about how awesome Clark is, I wanted to point out a few areas where I disagreed with her. First, I don’t feel that writing classrooms are necessarily cut-off from their surrounding world; students are able to make connections between their coursework and their everyday lives, even if teachers don’t always make these connections explicit. Second, I don’t agree that digital rhetoric is going to completely displace traditional literary and essayistic forms; though multi-modal composition is good at certain things, there’s still a substantial value in confronting (and composing) traditional text on a traditional page. With this being said, it’s hard for me to tell if Clark is actually taking the extreme viewpoints that I’m disagreeing with here; I may just be making assumptions about her text based off my profound distaste for techno-utopianism.

With this being said, I’ve been thinking about the potential for new media to transform my own classrooms. Though I was extremely hesitant to use digital forms during my first year here, I’ve since realized that multi-modal web-based composition is an effective medium through which to explain the rhetorical problem to students. In real-world applications, the audiences, contexts, and purposes behind texts are extremely variable; we do students a disservice if we then define the rhetorical problem narrowly, teaching them only to write toward their teachers within a traditional classroom. More importantly, I’ve also come to realize that new media can at least facilitate my students’ experiencing inquiry and composition as I do—as something concerned with real world problems, upon which one may (or may not) be able to have a realistic impact. If the sole aim of the writing classroom, in the pupils mind, is assessment they obviously miss out on the broader potential for communication to transform (and be transformed by) community.

I’d be curious to hear what other people think about my English 102 ideas for next Spring. I’ll be doing a service-learning course, and was planning to emphasize web-based multi-modal composition. I’m not just talking blog posts; I was also thinking about Wikis, websites, and film as potential modes. As a nifty bonus, my students will be researching real-world problems that are situated within their communities as they produce some sort of product for their partner organizations. It seems to me that a course designed along these lines is better equipped to teach the values of recursive inquiry and problem-solving that underlies academic research. But I’m not just trying to blow my own horn. I actually want to hear what other people think about this sort of thing—potential objections, suggestions, and etc. I’m still fleshing things out.