For students of
writing, learning takes place when their role ceases to be a passive and begins
to focus on their own native literacies and innovative skills. When students
begin to realize that behind each piece of writing exists an author who has
made choices in the creation of that rhetoric, they begin to evaluate those
choices and participate in a scholarly analysis. Frequently, students see
writing as a static medium, made up of finished products instead of something
that was created and fashioned based on the choices of the author. In order for
students to become thoughtful participants in any discipline, they must learn
to pay attention to the ways in which rhetoric is deployed across multiple
media formats. By identifying authorial choices and how to convey the structure
and shape of these choices within a disciplinary language, students learn how
to deploy rhetoric themselves in multimodal environments, as well as with
multiple media platforms. Thus, the objective of my composition course is to
teach students to identify their own writing and the writing of others across
media formats as an active conversation into which they will enter.
The first objective
of this course is to help students define a conversation in relation to their
colleagues in the classroom. In a seminar format that mixes writing, reviewing,
and workshop elements, students participate and learn by innovating and
generating their own ideas. Reading assignments will only form a small amount
of class time in order to give students an introduction to their field of
choice. This will be supplemented by targeted media projects that encourage
students to use the digital tools at hand to explore different ways of framing
questions through different literacies.
The goal will ultimately be to see them work across these multiple
fields in order to understand how modern literacy includes presentation tools,
internet sources, and other media innovations that will actually help them to
address a wider audience of more diverse peoples.
My role in the
classroom is to help students bring their ideas to life, not prescribe those
ideas for them. My role is not hugely different from their own. I am a part of their
scholarly conversation and, in many ways a resource for their own
investigations. My job, as I see it, is to demonstrate the type of audience
member that I want each student to be both inside and outside the classroom.
Under this philosophy,
students are taught an awareness of composition and the rhetorical situation in
and through multimodal, analytic and research oriented workshops. In order to
become successful students and professionals, students need to be able to
locate and situate themselves in a multitude of rhetorical across disciplinary
conversations and media formats.
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