As in: Composition , Media , Reading

Our reading group meeting was fantastic last night. We met to chat about the first couple chapters of Writing New Media by Wysocki, Johnson-Eilola, Selfe, and Sirc. As our conversation ranged over a wide territory of issues, we started talking about Selfe's piece, "Students Who Teach Us," in particular her description of David, a young man who developed outstanding technological literacy skills while simultaneously failing to succeed in college—so much so that he flunked out. Selfe writes:

To make it possible for students to practice, value, and understand a full range of literacies—emerging, competing, and fading—English composition teachers have got to be willing to expand their own understanding of composing beyond conventional bounds of the alphabetic. And we have to do so quickly or risk having composition studies become increasingly irrelevant. (54)

Selfe buys into the idea that the need for electrate composition in our classes ties to the changing world outside; we need to learn to recognize these other ways of communicating and help teach them. She says, on page 51, that when David's teachers failed to recognize his new technological literacies, the "missed important opportunities to link their instruction goals to his developing strengths" (51).

Pegeen asked why David's instructors should have recognized his new media literacies, rather than his competency in his own dialect. Had his instructors been willing to go to bat against "standard English" and the power-centered grammar rules that go with it, he may have succeeded. In short, our discussion last night asked why new media should be the space through which we "stay relevant" and (implicitly) "change the world." Why not use our knowledge that different dialects operate under perfectly logical grammar systems and our understanding that standard English grammar reinforces power structures that put at a disadvantage the already disadvantaged to argue for the validity of poly-vocality, rather than the validity of new media?

Whoo doggies, it was a beaut of a conversation. Here are a few of the highlights:

1. After a long conversation, we generally agreed on the idea that perhaps it needn't be either/or but rather could be both/and. Teaching and being aware of both kinds of polyvocality allows us to leverage the student's talents best.
2. New Media pulls ahead in many minds because it's clearly recognized by systems of power as important. In part, systems of power also recognize that while digital technologies can allow for sophisticated articulations of thought, they can also be used to replicate existing structures of power (as with, say, TOPIC).
3. With both New Media and Alternative Grammars, we generally agreed that our teaching balances between the rhetorical, idealistic goals of our ethics (in which we recognize and teach the intellectual value of these ideas) and the practical needs of our students who come to the college for credentialing (whom we tell that instructors in other departments won't appreciate what we know here—that this work you're doing has value). The question we returned to is why we're willing to go to bat for new media and not for polyvocal grammars?
4. Perhaps the "both/and" idea becomes increasingly relevant as we think about the ways in which economically disadvantaged groups have made use of new medias to express their ideas; mixing, hip-hop, skratching become spaces where these elements collide/intersect. (To pay homage to that crossing, Doug put in "The Humpty Dance" while we chatted.)
5. Finally, we acknowledged that New Media's popularity also stems from its institutional currency. Because of point 2 above, new media scholarship helps get people published, get jobs, get money. Arguing for alternative grammars does not (Norm lamented that this discussion is much harder to have since the ebonics fiasco).

Our coversation led me to re-think much of how I approach grammar (philosophically), but ultimately won't change what I do with it in the classroom right now. Instead, it will certainly influence my thinking about the value of new media scholarship. I definitely concur with the notion that new media scholarship affords another avenue into the discussion of polyvocality—it might even be the element that opened the door for such a discussion.

Posted by briley at May 13, 2005 5:49 AM