Rationale
"...we need to get smarter in ways that match the challenges we face. The time is now to support the role of learning in the pursuit of discovery and to embrace the powerful agency of culture." Lynda Barry's Syllabus (2014)
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DISCOVERING COMPOSITION is designed not only to take advantage of the flood of coded information continually pouring into our worlds from all sides, but also to steal time for considering that information through a more critical lens than the momentum of our days typically allows. Drawing upon Harvard professor David Edwards's emphasis on discovery and collaboration, Discovering Composition functions much like what he refers to as a "culture lab," wherein students are invited to experiment in cross-disciplinary, multimodal practices in the pursuit of rhetorical and cultural literacy, as well as social action. Edwards describes the process as "translat[ing] experimental ideas from educational, through cultural, to social practice" (Wired). The culture lab, according to Edwards, asks students "to look, listen, and discover, using their own creative genius, while observing contemporary phenomena that matter today." By fostering an appetite for inquiry and privileging the discovery and connection of ideas, Discovering Composition provides students with the rhetorical literacy and creativity they need to bring about cultural change in society at large. Culture labs often invite art/design experiments as an exploratory route for problematic questions that don't exactly fit into the conventional science or engineering labs; likewise, Discovering Composition will also spend time on multiple literacies, such as visual rhetorics of social media, the rhetorical implications of technology, and the non-traditional modes of expression available to one in the 21st century.
As a "Lab" of sorts, this course is synergistically compartmentalized, meaning students develop their noticing skills and critical lenses both on and off-line. At a time when we have come to inhabit our digital worlds perhaps more than our physical, this course provides students with the opportunity to bridge the two worlds through a unique and active process of discovery, ideation, reflection, and transformation--every day. With a nod to cartoonist, writer, and interdisciplinary professor Lynda Barry, I have made the composition book--or commonplace journal--one of the fundamental components for this course: "Using comp books and handwriting and natural human instinct for storytelling as a means of transferring something from one person to another" (9). In addition to in-class writing/sketching activities at every meeting, students are responsible for writing/sketching/noting in their comp books every day: As Barry notes, "Part of what we are doing in this class is noticing what we notice and noticing more, but doing it in a natural way as we move through our day" (83, emphasis added). The comp book practice developed partially from thinking about Geoffrey Sirc's notion of "box logic," which he points out in regards to Marcel Duchamp's 1934 Green Box as a composition of the personal notes Duchamp collected and composed while working on The Large Glass. This class will collaborate on a digital version of what Sirc refers to as "the prose catalogue," posting interesting compositions or tidbits students find online into our Discovery Archive Blog, which will serves as our "readings" bank for the course. This decision serves two purposes (at least): First, by encouraging students to actively engage with their own environment, the unique digital worlds which they already inhabit, they come to understand how those environments and ideas can be critically considered in an academic setting. This is empowering, but also serves to propel the fuel for discovery so that students continue to critically engage with the media they confront even after the class is over. So "box-logic" fits into both the reading assignments, the selection of which students play an active and primary role, and in the actual composition process with their paper notebooks: "Texts as a collection of interesting, powerful statements. A kind of daybook or artist's notebook...jotting notes on the fly, sound-bite apercus that sound good by themselves but can also become workable bits in a larger structure," and bringing into focus the statement it begins to make making overall (Sirc 112-113). Sirc sees Duchamp's The Green Box as emblematic of the way technology can fit into today's composition courses: "allowing students an easy entre into composition, a compelling medium and genre with which to re-arrange textual materials--both original and appropriated--in order to have those materials speak the student's own voice and concerns, allowing them to come up with something obscure, perhaps, yet promising illumination" (113). The interplay between the technological and the tangible allows students to experience the materiality of the compositions, but it will also emphasize the physicality of ideation and reconnect the mind with the hand. There are some aspects to writing by hand which enrich the composition process and facilitate understanding through physical activity, and these are not retrievable in the digital realm--at least not yet. Also, as Wysocki contends in Writing New Media, word-processing programs can actually limit our creative process as they require one to write in straight, parallel lines, for example: “How many word-processing or Web page composing software packages do you know that encourage scribbling, doodling, writing outside the margins, or writing in anything but straight lines?” (6). Of course the materiality of the text affects the relationship between the composer and the composition, and students will spend time reflecting on how writing by hand changes their processes of discovery, creativity, and composition. For Duchamp, painting "should have to do with the gray matter, with out urge for understanding," and comp books provide a space for working out understanding over extended periods of time as a loose, self-organizing web of original and quoted ideas begins to evolve in the physical text through one's own hands. By the end of the semester, students will have a clear idea of the cultural topics/issues which concern or interest them. They will have also completed scaffolding assignments which have asked them to unearth these ideas on a regular basis, becoming comfortable with the process of connecting complex ideas, which may have previously seemed unrelated. Discovering Composition also revolves around clearing a path toward rhetorical intervention to affect change, be it personal, cultural, or institutional. Ideas I gleaned from Bruce McComiskey's social process heuristics for rhetorical inquiry in Teaching Composition as a Social Process (2000) have proven invaluable to the development of my course. McComiskey's ideas about social process heuristics will play a primary role in the background of class activities: every activity, be it discovery, discussion, writing or otherwise, subtly incorporate an understanding of the textual, rhetorical, and discursive levels of composition. We will begin every class with a composition or sketchnoting exercise, during which we consume some media--from songs to poetry readings to interviews and documentaries, etc--while drawing and taking notes in the composition books. After we have viewed and discussed the material, students will then reflect on which elements of the composition influenced or impacted them and how this was achieved. We will also devote small periods of class time for "field research," during which students browse the internet for discoveries--typically the searches will be aimed in a particular direction, depending on what we are studying that day. Exercises such as these will encourage and hone student skills in what McComiskey refers to as critical consumption, while also emphasizing the importance of discovery in learning. Students today are surrounded on all sides by rhetorical influences, and I hope to take advantage of that fact by actively engaging them in the process of reading selection. By focusing the course lens the various “texts” students confront, consume and navigate on a daily basis, this course will arm them with the ability the engage critically with the their individual realities. Every week will be an adventure in discovery as the students seek to apply the rhetorical principles they have learned in the classroom to the world outside and back again in emphasizing Bruce McComiskey’s cyclical “‘social-process’ heuristic for rhetorical inquiry” (20). As McComisky points out, “Students who engage in detailed heuristic exploration of all three moments in the cycle of cultural production, contextual distribution, and critical consumption develop the sense that culture itself is a constantly changing process and that their own writing can influence some of the changes that cultures undergo” (24). In our increasingly multimodal world, a course like Discovering Composition provides students with the opportunity to actively engage and intervene in the production of cultural values. Email newsletters are fast becoming a top choice for readers, so Discovering Composition students will be producing rhetorical intervention in a topically relevant and timely form of media. Newsletters also require expert curation skills, which students will learn to master over the course of the semester. The bridge between the physical and digital worlds in their composition books also serves as a way to continually practice identifying effective threads weaving in and out of curated content, and re-threading those elements into a coherent message for readers. The aim of this course is to discover, excavate, analyze, and remake the culture that makes us. The internet will serve as a primary source for discovery, and much of what we read/consume/discuss each week will likely be online, but we will focus also on building a bridge between the students' digital and physical worlds as a way to filter, process and more critically engage with what the media they consume. |
Works Cited
Barry, Lynda. Syllabus: Notes From an Accidental Professor. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2014. Print.
Edwards, David A. "American Schools Are Training Kids for a World That Doesn’t Exist." Wired Magazine. wired.com. 17 October 14. Web.
McComiskey, Bruce. Teaching Composition as a Social Process. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2000. Print.
Wysocki, Anne Frances, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc. Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2004. Print.
Edwards, David A. "American Schools Are Training Kids for a World That Doesn’t Exist." Wired Magazine. wired.com. 17 October 14. Web.
McComiskey, Bruce. Teaching Composition as a Social Process. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2000. Print.
Wysocki, Anne Frances, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc. Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2004. Print.