Musings and Thoughts: Composition Theory and Practice

While I’m going to ask my students to write a reflection paper after they complete their wiki city guides, I’m not sure how much of that will be narrative and how much will be critical.  Originally, I wanted something closer to an analysis, but as I finish my city wiki, I’m seeing a lot of value in a true, narrative reflection.  Perhaps I will ask them to do a bit of both.  In any case, I’ve written a short narrative reflection from my perspective as an instructor turned student (well–in terms of this project of course!)  Hopefully, it gives you an idea of the major milestones I’ve hit as I’ve worked toward a finished project of which I’m quite proud.  

Having completed my City Guide on the Wiki, I feel as if I’ve climbed Mt. Everest in many ways.  Yes, there are instructions included on a help page, but they are fairly limited and don’t explain all of the random small mistakes you might make, even as you cut in paste.  So, by trial and error, I’ve discovered a lot of cool things like how to change the line spacing and how the layout of the edit screen is little like the layout on the wiki that it creates.  As I’ve worked, I’ve had to amend my own expectations though.  Although I only completed the final product of this project, I tried to do some of the work I will ask my students to do that precedes the actual creation of the wiki page.  For instance, I re-read selections from the books I’m using; I watched a little travel channel (ok, I just added actively thinking about my project to the mix); I looked at online city guides; I looked at travel guides at Barnes and Noble; I looked at City Wikis from Bloomington, Ann Arbor, and Davis.  However, many of the travel guides do things with design that we can’t do with our resources in the composition class.  Especially in the case of the city wikis, where some of the sites have been made with more sophisticated programs, it’s somewhat disappointing to realize that our wiki is limited in some ways.  However, what we can do is certainly just as good or better than Wikipedia–and once I realized that, everything worked out.  Interestingly, that brought me to issues of audience and of purpose: this wiki city guide is for students of Columbia and MU who are already here.  I have it built in to the assignment that each of the 2 groups will have a slightly different set of audiences and purposes, but when it comes down to it, they are working with people who are in Columbia anyway and want to know what they can do given that fact.  Even for the group writing for people driving through town on I-70, they must realize that those travelers will only see their wiki if a student or member of the MU wiki community sends them a link to it.  In the end, I guess what doing this project proved to me about the assignment is that it does what we are always frustrated their comp classes don’t do: have assignments that have real exigencies beyond the imagined or contrived one of an analysis or other project.  

 In completing my city wiki in particular, since it is of my hometown, Rogers, Arkansas, I also learned a lot of things that surprised me greatly.   First of all, I learned things about my hometown that I never realized.  For instance, I’ve been to Pea Ridge National Military Park dozens of times, but I never realized how many other places in the area have ties to that important Civil War battle that secured Missouri for the Union.  I learned through the research for this project though that the Massey Building in nearby Bentonville, current home of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, was a hotel during the Civil War and quartered Union troops.  And, get this–my dad worked in the Massey Building on one of its upper floors! Who knew that when I was 5 years old and was exploring the building I shared the same space that Civil War soldiers once inhabited?!  I also learned though that troops camped in the War Eagle Mill area, which I only think about as the home of one of the biggest craft fairs in the region.  So, all in all, the experience of creating the wiki was a lot like the experience of the mystory or any of the other activities we’ve done that collect information and show the already existing connections.  Even though my students will be creating a guide to their home away from home, I think that this wiki could serve a purpose beyond its pedagogical one if it can bring them closer to the community in which they live.  While I found a place where I interacted in history already, perhaps the students will find ways for them to do that in the future, even if it’s as simple as exploring a new restaurant or biking the Katy Trail.  If everything goes accordingly, I think this is a particularly good project to do in the fall–for some of these students coming to live in Columbia is a travel adventure in itself and the idea that creating a functioning guide to the city for their peers that also helps them become a part of the community really would be an amazing thing.  Finally, considering that I created a wiki myself whereas my students will be only responsible for parts of one (as far as content goes), I am excited for the depth in which my students can go into each part of the city guide.  Again and again I found myself wanting to add more and being drawn from one website to another, but there is a limit to what one person can do (I’ve tried to plan, collect, and design in a space of 3-4 weeks, just like I’m asking my students to do).  So, you can only imagine what a group of 10 people working together can create.  I can’t wait to learn about Columbia!

Again, linking never seems to work correctly.

http://www.bloomingpedia.org/wiki/Bloomingpedia

http://arborwiki.org/index.php/Main_Page

http://daviswiki.org/Front_Page

Rationale:After surfing the net to investigate the presence of Wiki sites for cities, it appears that city wikis are a rising trend world-wide.  They also seem especially popular in college towns.  (Below I’ve posted some examples including Bloomington (Indiana), Ann Arbor (Michigan), and Davis (California) that I’d want my students to look at).   Over the course of the semester, we’ll look at various sorts of travel guides, both print and online, and so I think there will be interesting distinctions to make about how wikis fit into that scheme.  My own first instinct is that since anyone can edit a wiki, then the city wiki as travel guide is the best way to reach audiences, especially since it is a “guide” for the audience to the experience of travel.  Not only that, but it seems that the way a wiki works is better for the businesses and other institutions that make that experience possible because they get more (and better) press.  

As for the logistics of the project, here’s what I’m thinking so far: 

Divide the students into 2 groups of 10; they’ll do plenty of work individually over the semester and I’ll still require that they turn in their work at various stages in the project on paper (more to keep them on track than anything else–I see this project as being potentially daunting and creating tension if students don’t think members of their group are contributing enough) 

Each group will be composing/designing their Columbia Wiki for a different audience: either new college students or visitors passing through, say on a vacation that takes them down I-70.  This seems like such a great way to teach audience that I think I might add an on-paper follow-up assignment that asks each student to individually assess their own creation in these terms–providing a rationale for the project so to speak.  

Each group will decide what information to include and how to divide up the work (and submit this info to me).  Categories to include might be: demographics, history, education, business, location, accommodations, dining, entertainment, shopping, directions, etc.  Each category would also include links to the sites/info they provide. 

Each student will keep a Flikr album of photos they take of relevant sites in Columbia; the groups will then choose from their entire collection when putting together the site. (hmm…teaching collecting more material than you would use!) 

Students will be able to use the Discussion board feature on Blackboard to try out ideas and revise them–like a big virtual whiteboard. 

All in all, students will be researching Columbia as a city, which seems useful since they will be here for a while and since we tend to forget that college towns are much more than the colleges and everything that goes with that culture. 

Example City Wikis:

My task was to pick a thing/concept and then map a trajectory for it through brief research.  I was confused for a good while, so I’m still not sure I did the right thing, but since I’m interested in travel and will be building my course around the idea, I chose a particular obsession related to that: airlines. As I surfed the net, I found a few themes–not necessarily phrases–come up.  I also tried to just think of everything that comes to mind when I hear the word “airlines.”  In the end, I think the overarching association is that of a clash or a destabilization.  To distill this abstraction down to more concrete terms, air travel seems to provide a microcosm of society that intensifies the differences between people and the tenuous nature of a collective of individuals (society), from production to business to you or I boarding a plane.  

Here are the words/ideas I noted from my research and brainstorming:

travel/transportation

economy/commerce

expense

uncomfortable

inefficientinconvenient

worldwide

trade

terrorism

TSA

Airline (the TV show about Southwest airlines)

rules and regulations

planes becoming more hotel-like 

dangerous

subject to human error

“American”/”United” (collective, identity-giving names)

globalization

hub and spokes model vs. place-to-place routing like Southwest

Airplane (disaster movies)

Soul Plane (plane as embodiment of cultures)

American Airline documentary (on CNN–”day in the life”)

class divisions

linking countries (first flight from Chicago to Shanghai, late Spring 2006) 

Below is the link to my Flikr project.  For a future 18thC novel course I hope to teach someday, I have collected lots of book covers from 11 most popular novels read and taught from the period.  Look for both descriptions under the pictures and annotated notes that you must scroll over to see.   And, sorry you have to cut and paste the link…linking doesn’t ever seem to work as it should.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/20902944@N08/sets/72157608364829904/

In trying to draw connections between Haynes, Rice, and Dworkin, Greg and I were left with one final, big question–self-serving as it may be.  Once again, we both remained concerned how radical, experimental pedagogies can work for non-tenured instructors who feel administrative pressures to have certain grade distributions or to teach the skills expected by other departments–even if we disagree with them–and make sure our students can execute those skills.  We both agree that emphasizing collecting is imperative–that is what research is all about, not to mention the act of composing itself. We also agree that new media and its methodology provides an effective way to teach those skills because it prevents students from fitting conclusions and evidence to a ready-made thesis and forces them to look at far more sources than they will use.  Yet, again, we both feel responsible for giving our students the experience, if not the skills, to succeed in classes where they will be expected to do traditional research. Yes, assignments such as the travel wiki I’m doing with my class next semester teaches collecting, but how can we  (or can we) use this as a springboard to a more traditional, academic project? In other words, how can we (or can we) ensure that the lessons learned through new media and radical pedagogies are absorbed and able to be applied by our students later down the road in more conventional situations?

If we orient Cynthia Haynes’s article “Writing Offshore” with Jeff Rice’s “The 1963 Hip Hop Machine” as two very different attempts to revitalize composition pedagogy–one getting rid of the argumentative essay and the other thinking about it differently–Craig Dworkin seems to come down somewhere in the middle, at least in the place he turns to found his radical pedagogy.  Though Dworkin talks a lot about mushrooms (very interesting, yet I feel like mushrooms are involved as I read it…), it is important to note where he starts: with literature.  With Haynes seeing composition as the realm of the flaneur and caught up in issues of place and space and Rice using the methodology of new media, Dworkin seems downright conventional; in talking about Norton anthologies and avant-garde/experiemental literature, he is talking about canon formation.  Essentially he proposes that we look at pedagogy the same way we look at experimental literature because, as he points out, “avant-gardes are…’always pedagogical’” (604).  The resistance to avant-garde literature is rooted as Dworkin sees it in the challenge it presents to communication and to representation.  For Dworkin, what looking to avant-garde lit would do for pedagogy is to “frustrate any model of comprehensive, monological, unmediated communication, and thus oppose…the repetitions of habit, the maintenance of the status quo, the representational and reproductive” (604).  So, Dworkin wants a truly radical pedagogy, but he chooses to look to literature for his model.  Indeed, Dworkin sees the “classroom as a laboratory” (605) and would like it to be an “enactment rather than an explication” (605).  This makes me wonder about Haynes’s article though…she also uses the word “lab.”  In her effort to reconceptualize composition, she urges us not to think of student writing as “ill,” calling that the writing lab mentality (670).  Aren’t we the ones–the teachers and tutors–who decide whether our “labs” are sites of “hazardous experiment” ( 604) where you set out without a diagnosis and a treatment or are, in fact, triage wards? For Dworkin, pedagogy is “living and learning” (607), so it can change and be influenced by many different things; it’s not static but rather re-forming itself–and it must.  After all, as Dworkin notes, the minute experimental literature becomes “familiarized, domesticated, inoculated, neutralized, and counteracted” (609) it has lost its power.  Pedagogy must always be radical, therefore, it must always be changing.    

In many ways, our own Jeff Rice’s article in CCC, “The 1963 Hip-Hop Machine: Hip-Hop Pedagogy As Composition” is the perfect piece to end with this semester.  All of the major concerns and ideas running through the essays we’ve read over the last two months culminate in Rice’s call for a pedagogy that integrates new media principles, while maintaining that the product of that pedagogy is still the argumentative essay.  As such, I’d like to highlight a few salient points. 

Rice’s thesis:”I begin with an analogy: teaching research-based argumentation and critique in composition studies is like learning how to perform hip-hop music.” (453) However, he poses the “analogy as a first step towards developing alternative or additional ways to engage composition students with the arugmentative essay.” (453) Important: In this context, Rice is interested not in hip-hop as  a genre, but as a methodology.  One of the most important distinctions we have been asked to make this semester in many of the readings and through our assignments is just this–that new media provides us with a new way of looking at composition because it too is a form of composition.  

For instance, take this digression: our discussion of Diane George’s work on visual rhetoric makes the same distinction.  She shows us that visual images are important because of what they bring to composition pedagogy that is new–not as a flashier replacement for tried and true written texts.  True, we should be skeptical of the use of popular culture in composition pedagogy, but we should make our judgments based on how the methodology of these new sources changes how we conceptualize and teach composition; we shouldn’t judge on the basis of the medium.  Anyway, one place where I’ve been thinking about this, reconsidering the basis on which I’ve rejected new pedagogies is in a comparison between two textbooks: Everything’s an Argument and Compose, Design, Advocate.   

Onward: Rice’s hip-hop pedagogy is an “examination of the way hip-hop constructs discourse, the way it produces rhetorical meaning through its complex method of digital sampling, and how such a rhetoric functions within the scope of argumentation” (454). “Through the complex juxtaposition of these isolated sounds, samplers construct new forms of meaning” (454).  The connection between composition and hip-hop for Rice is the word “whatever.”  Common to both the language of composition students and of hip-hop, “whatever” does not signify a lack of a response so much as a “sense that something has eluded the meaning of the response or of defiance, dismissal, and opposition” (455).  Whatever then gives us a space to work and a space to fill in meaning that is missing or revive meaning that is dismissed.  In order to illustrate this space, Rice turns to Barthes’s Camera Lucida in which Barthes argues that “the logic of photography as we currently know it, the referent of the image relating back to a real-life thing, no longer aids critical analysis.  In electronic culture, something else remains after we have deducted and named an image’s referent, something beyond initial meaning, something elusive” (qtd on 456).  For Barthes, this is what he calls the punctum, which is “the anything whatever, the sophisticated acme of value” (qtd on 456).  Rice then takes this reading and applies it to his hip-hop pedagogy explaining that “whatever challenges conventional reading practices by cutting a detail from its original source and recontextualizing it within a different setting” (456).  Just as Barthes isolates detail in photography, hip-hop isolates disparate sounds. And what is another way to talk about parts and the whole that we’ve already encountered? Collecting. Here we get to our some connections, collecting for one, which is the methodology of technology.  Rice, however, shows us how this can be put into practice; he say the answer is recontextualization, which hip-hop methodology does.  Breaking away from the essay now, the idea of recontextualizing something is essentially implies that you have to destroy something in order to make another, better thing.  Because I’m interested in revision, I think of that in this instance.  Revision studies have shown us that students revise constantly when they are unaware of it, but find it gut-wrenching to consciously treat their writing as a group of parts that can (and should) be moved, taken out, altered, put back in, put in another piece, etc.  Yet, that is what composition is according to hip-hop pedagogy–and according to Ray in “Tracking,” which we read earlier this semester.  Whether in revision or in the composing process (which I would argue is one and the same), what the students must become aware of is that this process is the way that composition works–not one way, but the way.  ”Just as DJs often search for breaks and cuts in the music that reveal patterns, so, too, does the student writer look for a pattern as a way to unite these moments into a new alternative argument and critique” (465).  Exercises like the mystory and methodologies like that of the production of hip-hop music illuminate this fact, but it seems that it is necessary to not only force ourselves to think of composition like that, but also to get our students to recognize it, perhaps through the use of hip-hop.   

One final connection:  Ray in “Tracking.”  At least superficially, these two pieces use the same metaphor in order to try to recast how we see the process of composition, but I’d like to try to put them into conversation a bit more closely than that.  Toward the conclusion of his article, Rice refers to the end product of his sampling and cutting as the mix, which he specifies parenthetically that he is performing (467).  Performing, of course, is an integral part of Ray’s argument and a recording put down in tracks is a recording “composed of performance’s surviving fragments” (777).  Ray too ends with a mix and his major concern emerges about representation as construction.  In distinguishing modern music (like jazz and classical) from rock and roll (which seems to be postmodern in that sense), Ray suggests that we should take the hint embedded in that move to representation as construction that rock ushered into the music world and apply that to our understanding of the production of other texts.  The question that remains for me about temporality, which is interesting since Rice says that his mix is performance and Ray says his is its surviving fragments. What has happened with temporality? Why does such a change matter?  My inclination is to think that Rice is right and that a mix is as much performance–the real deal, the whole–as its parts. It’s a small clarification, but it really does matter. Rice, by saying that the mix is the whole product, places the emphasis on the methodology and recoups this form of new media for the composition classroom.  It is this move which gives us something to work with because it gives us an intact, pure product to work for and show our students. 

I’d like to end with the same call and conclusion Rice ends with: that “the ultimate test for such a project is to recognize that this process doesn’t have to be done only with hip-hop music” (468).  What we’re interested in is how we can use sampling to change the way writers think about composition in all parts of the process–which works nicely with the notion that it is a recursive process, might I add.  So, what other ways can we foreground sampling, collecting, and cutting and pasting?      

When Melanie mentioned writer Shelley Jackson’s skin project in which her text is tattooed on the skin of people, one word per person, I thought what a wonderful example Jackson is for several of the things we have been discussing lately even though (or maybe because) she is practicing these ideas in creative writing, not in a composition pedagogy.  For one, her work follows the organizational logic of technology because it is non-linear–and this is the case both with her works published in computer-based mediums, on paper, and on bodies.  We can see how the skin project resists a linear structure, but another place to check out her work in this area is in her hypertext work Patchwork Girl.  (Unfortunately, you must purchase this work for $24.95 despite that it comes exclusively in an electronic format.)  And, as a matter of fact, Jackson’s own website resists conventional structural logic.  As for the second way that Jackson’s work plays out some of the concepts we’ve thought about in terms of composition pedagogy, her work, because of its non-linear structure and, in the case of Patchwork Girl, its use of new media, is about collecting–whether that is text that is gathered together in infinite combinations (hypertext format) or actual human bodies that can come together in infinite combinations to create “the text” anew again and again.   This, of course, is probably old news to most everyone else, but I had never heard of Jackson or of her work until the graduate students at Tennessee brought her to Knoxville as the creative writing speaker for our Nexus Interdisciplinary Conference.  However, she gave a wonderful talk in a small art gallery in downtown Knoxville in which she spoke about her works both in terms of the theory of hypertext and of her influences in a narrative that downright blew us all away, even the skeptics.  

Influences:

 –Visual argument valued for its design element (George)

–Collecting (Ulmer)

–Organic research/patterns (Ulmer; Sirc; Ray)

–Integrating popular culture (Ulmer; Sirc; Ray)

–Locating new sites of composition (Brooke; Sirc; Ulmer)

Brainstorming for the Assignment:

 It seems like the Wiki would be a good place to put these things together since it is such an easy place to test out design as the object of composition.  It also allows students to collect resources in a very tangible way–oftentimes from nontraditional sources.  An example of this might be the semester-end assignment I’m thinking about for my class next semester, which I want to loosely design around travel.  This end product would be a travel guide to Columbia, designed on the Wiki for students and their families.  That’s just me though…what all three of us agreed upon was that this is a very flexible assignment and could be molded to any topic or theme for a seemingly unlimited number of purposes and effects.