Hello Class (and wider world). Well, here we are in the last week of term. I am not sure why I was so caught off guard by how quickly the term ended. There's been a swamp of work for me lately, plus the family and I are going out of town this weekend for my niece's wedding. Plus my 53rd birthday is tomorrow, and how that happened I haven't the faintest idea. Like, 53 is over the hill and into the pasture. Which would be fine if I didn't still have to dig lots of trenches and build lots of fences and herd a lot of (if you'll pardon the expression) livestock.
Multi-modal composition. I agree with those of you who say the question is not whether but how. I like the model in the article we read (Costello's "The Art of Revision") in that it allows for a fertile hybridity of all the elements of genre: voice, audience, form, focus, purpose, context, register. I also like that it makes real something that incoming students often have trouble believing: that there's nothing studied here in the Ivory Tower that is not important or relevant for the wider civic space. The boundaries are far more porous than many students believe, and I think it's pretty awesome to invite students to develop some expertise on a subject and then to bring that expertise to bear on challenges in the "real world." Indeed, I like this more and more as I think about it. Doesn't this model absolutely capture one element of strong liberal-arts education?--the element of becoming a learned and engaged public intellectual. And it affirms a central point about responsible civic engagement: that we should be careful to weigh in on public debates from a stance of knowing. There is so much awful rhetoric in America today. So much. And huge damage has been done to our civic space by people who cherish their right to opinionize before they know anything truly.
So yes, DO use multi-modal assignments and methods. Do make use of all the "affordances" (hate that word) that they offer. DO use them however you can to avoid rock-chewing, fake genres, fake voices, absent creativity. DO.
Multi-modal composition. I agree with those of you who say the question is not whether but how. I like the model in the article we read (Costello's "The Art of Revision") in that it allows for a fertile hybridity of all the elements of genre: voice, audience, form, focus, purpose, context, register. I also like that it makes real something that incoming students often have trouble believing: that there's nothing studied here in the Ivory Tower that is not important or relevant for the wider civic space. The boundaries are far more porous than many students believe, and I think it's pretty awesome to invite students to develop some expertise on a subject and then to bring that expertise to bear on challenges in the "real world." Indeed, I like this more and more as I think about it. Doesn't this model absolutely capture one element of strong liberal-arts education?--the element of becoming a learned and engaged public intellectual. And it affirms a central point about responsible civic engagement: that we should be careful to weigh in on public debates from a stance of knowing. There is so much awful rhetoric in America today. So much. And huge damage has been done to our civic space by people who cherish their right to opinionize before they know anything truly.
So yes, DO use multi-modal assignments and methods. Do make use of all the "affordances" (hate that word) that they offer. DO use them however you can to avoid rock-chewing, fake genres, fake voices, absent creativity. DO.
Happy early birthday.
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