Dear Instructor,
I am writing to you in response to Mark Sample and Kelly Schrum's article, "What's Wrong With Writing Essays: A Conversation." Seeming as how you've assigned this article in the context of the ENGLISH 101 curriculum, I am inclined to believe that at least some of what Sample and Schrum are discussing here could play an important role in the work that we do throughout the semester.
Up to this point in my academic career much of my experience as a composer has taken place within "conventional" text-based genres and media, which inspires both excitement and anxieties as I come into contact with this new communicative frontier. On the one hand, there is quite a bit of value in "integrat[ing] more and more public writing" (87) into the ENGLISH 101 curriculum. This move to further underscore the social implications involved in the act of composing is very important to me. It not only raises the stakes for the work I will engage in throughout my composing processes, it might also serve as a generative space in which my readership is not only limited to the confines of the ENGLISH 101 classroom or the academy writ large. Indeed, this sort of "public writing" problematizes my own anxieties about academic writing acting as the equivalent of playing for an empty auditorium, so to speak. For this reason, the prospect of "moving away from asking students to write toward asking them to weave. To build, to fabricate, to design" (89; italics in original), is something I welcome with open arms.
However, while I agree with Sample and Schrum when they suggest that "the only thing a student essay measures is how well a student can conform to the rigid thesis/defense model" (87), I am also quite tentative and anxious about completely embracing unfamiliar genres and media that I am not entirely prepared to use and navigate critically. I trust that these sorts of assigned projects will not be foisted on we unsuspecting students, and that there will be a measure of course scaffolding in which you help us construct bridges between our existing knowledge base about text-based conventions and the alternative genres and media that might allow us to communicate more thoroughly and creatively with a wider public audience.
In their article, Sample and Schrum extol the virtues of making students uncomfortable but not paralyzed (96). I am hoping that as the semester progresses I will be able to strike a comfortable balance between these feelings of discomfort and paralysis. I am more than happy and willing to step outside of my comfort zone and "try on" new ways of thinking and being. I hope that both my excitement and anxieties are well taken, but please feel free to contact me if you have any further questions, comments, or concerns about anything I have said here. Thank you so much for your willingness to think outside of the box in terms of the work that we do inside and outside of the ENGLISH 101 curriculum. This will certainly make all of us more versatile and socially-conscious composers as we engage with new and exciting genres and media. Have a wonderful day!
Sincerely,
Mark Daniel Triana
Washington State University Student
Ok I've tried to comment twice now and it didn't save so this is my last attempt. I really like the issues raised in this letter. The first concerns the discussion centering around public writing and how it provides deeper engagement for the student to their composition when they know they have an audience and aren't just composing for an empty room. The second big point I like is your attention to bridging the gap between where students are at regarding multimodal proficiency and instructor expectations for executing successful multimodal objectives. I definitely agree it's a process that needs scaffolding. I think we all kind of clung onto the idea that this process should be uncomfortable, not paralyzing. Great letter! I'm crossing my fingers this comment works..
ReplyDeleteLucy
Mark,
ReplyDeleteI really appreciated your critique about wanting to make the students "uncomfortable" but not "paralyzed." It kind of reminded me what Zarah said in 501 last semester--that students should go out of their comfort zone during these kinds of courses. Also, I liked your tie into the idea of creating "public writing" as opposed to "academic writing." What I would have appreciated in the essay, or in any of the pedagogy related articles we've read thus far, is how our cultural is moving more from text-based to image-based and why that change has occurred. What are your thoughts? Also, how can we push for more image-based composition outside of the writing/DTC/humanities classroom?
Thanks for posting!
--Lacy