To digitize or not to digitize, that is the question

If you want a deep understanding of the theoretical position that underpins an academic department, sit in on its textbook committees. Textbooks tell us a lot about how teachers believe a discipline should be presented to students, and in an education-centered discipline like composition, where pedagogy is life, the textbook an instructor puts forward often says a lot about what she thinks writing "is" and how writing should be taught.

In my department, one recent debate has been over the technology components of our textbooks. Specifically, we've been debating whether to make the investment for another year in a software program that has failed miserably this year (MyCompLab, to name names). Every instructor I've spoken to has found the software all but useless. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that we don't really need technology to teach writing - not just this technology, which admittedly has more than a few bugs to work out, but any technology. I can't even get instructors to sign up to use our department's computer lab. (Yup, that's singular, as in one computer lab for every writing class taught by the largest department on campus.)

Personally, I can't imagine writing without a computer, and I don't just mean I can't imagine composing by hand. Over the past few years, I've come to see writing as much more than alphanumeric text. Yet, at least in my department, I seem to be quite alone in this perspective that technology has revolutionized writing and that writing teachers need to get onboard if we don't want to become absolutely obsolete, a typewriter in a Photoshop world. And, after doing a little reading, I've discovered that this split between the digitiz-ers and the non-digitiz-ers seems to run fairly deep in composition.

Take, for example, the essay "Multimedia Literacy: Confessions of a Non-Major," by Neuwirth, written in response to the 2002 Conference on College Composition and Communication sessions that called for more integration of digital and visual rhetoric into composition classes. Neuwirth questions whether we (meaning writing teachers) have the time, expertise, interest or need to become schooled in digital literacy and visual rhetoric. Neuwirth describes her own fish-out-of-water experience in an introductory graphic design courses, taken specifically to remediate her ignorance regarding visual literacy. Her essay reminds me of complaints first-year writing students often voice in their reflective journals: Learning a new language, the language of the visual, is surprisingly difficult, prompting Neuwirth to feel hopelessly inadequate as her teacher consistently finds depths of image analysis Neuwirth has simply overlooked, until at last, declaring defeat, she takes an incomplete in the basic design course.

Neuwirth's conclusion seems to be that writing teachers have enough to be getting on with without learning the nuances of visual rhetoric. She offers alternatives to teaching visual rhetoric in composition, such as requiring students to enroll in the graphics design course she took - and didn't complete (190). In a way, I understand Neuwirth's frustration. After all, we go to graduate school to specialize, to become experts in one academic area; MAs or PhDs in hand, it would be nice to believe that the hard part of learning was over, that from here on out the most we'll need to do is "keep up" with the field by reading its journals, attending its major conferences, workshopping with our colleagues several times a semester. We don't expect that, to stay relevant, we'll need to learn an entirely new discipline - and what's more, even figure out how to integrate that discipline (as Craig Stroupe writes in "Visualizing English") into the discipline of rhetoric and composition that we already know.

But my sympathy for Neuwirth's position runs thin for two reasons. First, to me, refusing to learn about and teach visual literacy is akin to the History of Magic professor in Harry Potter who goes on teaching as a ghost, never realizing he is dead: Composition (and literature, for that matter) are evolving fields, and if we don't evolve, we become obsolete as both teachers and as writers. Our education doesn't stop the moment we're granted our advanced, post-baccalaureate degrees.

So on the one hand, I am against Neuwirth in principle, because I believe that education is a life-long process. Yet this belief in and of itself doesn't justify learning about visual rhetoric or immersing ourselves in digital literacy. For that, we have to consider, as Craig Stroupe does, that the Internet, hypertext, and multimedia publishing technologies have created a new kind of literacy, what he calls a "hybrid literacy." This "hybrid" combines the visual and the verbal, and unlike the traditional pictures-added-to-text model, this hybrid litreacy makes the visual illuminative, not illustrative, of the verbal (628). In other words, it's a brave new world, and one that has fundamentally altered the ways we compose, analyze and perceive "text."

I put text in quotes for a reason, because as Stroupe argues, I believe the definition of text has extended now well beyond the alphanumeric definition. "Text" may include still photographs, animations, computer-aided drawings, videos, audio files, or music soundtracks; in fact, some "texts" have no alphanumeric components at all. This hybrid literacy did not develop overnight. It has been creeping into the mainstream for more than a decade, and as technology rockets forward, making it ever easier and more affordable for everyday people to create multimedia texts, that "creeping" has become a fast-moving stream flooding contemporary perceptions of text.

As writers and as writing teachers, we are intimately bound to text. If the definition of text changes, if literacy goes hybrid, we can no longer ponder Neuwirth's questions, because to ask whether we have the time, expertise, interest or need to teach visual rhetoric and digital literacy is to ask a question that's already been answered. We must learn to write in new ways, and we must teach our students to write in new ways, because the future is already here; hybrid literacy is no longer a possibility on the horizon but a here-and-now reality.

What I think the real issue is with Neuwirth's essay (and granted, she was writing in 2002) is that she's going about bringing the visual (and the digital) into the composition classroom in the wrong way. What we need is Stroupe's approach: Instead of seeing the visual as "extra" and the digital as "extraneous," we need to re-theorize language to include the visual, the verbal, and the digital as integral components of meaning-making. If we truly embrace hybrid literacy, we won't feel overwhelmed as we try to "add" the visual and the digital to our already overburdened composition classrooms. Instead, we'll be teaching visual rhetoric and digital literacy as always-already necessary aspects of learning to write in this digital age.

Does that mean we, as teachers, may have to do some hard work in learning to theorize the visual and to work effectively within the digital? That we might have to enroll in a graphic design course or even a computer class to familiarize ourselves with software like Adobe and Photosop?Absolutely. But that shouldn't be a problem.

After all, we're teachers. Learning is supposed to be our life's work.

The state of graduate research

This past week, I had the opportunity to act as a discussion leader and work-in-progress presenter at the Conference on College Composition and Communication's Research Network Forum. I had some wonderful conversations with other professors and current graduate students about our research projects, but while I came away from the forum with some excellent ideas and helpful feedback, I also came away with a nagging concern about the state of graduate research.

Perhaps my concern was prompted by one of the morning's plenary speakers, Rebecca Rickly, who spoke on "Making Waves in the Research Culture of Graduate Programs." Rebecca's concern was that we haven't done a sufficient job of preparing graduate students in rhetoric and composition to understand three fundamental components of empirical research:

1. Good researchers can correctly articulate their research methods - which means, as researchers, we have to understand the research methods we use and why we use them;
2. Good researchers can effectively focus research projects to answer specific questions in a set time frame; and
3. Good researchers appreciate how "messy" research is, but to develop this appreciation, we have to do hands-on research.

Rebecca's major complaint about graduate research methods courses is that they don't provide enough of #3 - enough hands-on opportunities for research. She lamented that the outcome of most graduate research methods courses is either (or both) a literature review or a research prospectus. In her classes, she explained, she had students undertake a "micro-study," to see how difficult, messy, and downright frustrating empirical research can be.

To me, a literature review and research prospectus doesn't seem like small potatoes as an outcome for a methods course, perhaps because this is how I was prepared: At SIU-Carbondale, Dr. Ronda Dively taught our methods course, and she introduced us to quantitative and qualitative as well as experimental and naturalistic methods. She taught us a flexible conception of research - how to use the literature review to find, refine, and shape our research questions; how to use the methodology description of a prospectus to anticipate and address methodological pitfalls and counterarguments to our procedures; how to determine the best methodology for answering our research questions. But the methods course wasn't the end of my education as a researcher. For that, I had my dissertation itself, which Dr. Dively directed, and through which I learned a whole lot about empirical methodology.

Now, here's my concern. I worked with some tremendously intelligent Master's and PhD students at the RNF, but by in large, these students seemed to have a very limited understanding of how empirical research works. For instance, one PhD student wanted to study TA resistance to graduate pedagogy seminars, but her plan - and she was well into the study - was simply to look for resistance by reviewing those seminars' syllabi. She didn't seem to have considered whether or not this was an effective means of answering her question; she seemed to have chosen it because it allowed her to circumvent IRB approval for using human subjects.

We might ascribe this simply to laziness, except that this young woman was obviously dedicated enough to bring her plans to a research network forum a thousand miles from her home institution, on her own dime. She obviously cared about the research. She just didn't seem to know how to go about answering her question, or even, it seemed to me, how to ask a good question that could be explored through empirical research. Her presentation, and the presentation of many other grad students I sat with or spoke to during the RNF, convinced me that something has gone wrong in our graduate programs, and I don't think it falls squarely onto the research methods courses. Rather, I think it's a lack of hands-on direction by dissertation and thesis committees.

A research methods course is only an introduction to empirical methodology. It is a necessary introduction, but unlike Rebecca Rickly, I don't think it can also usefully encompass hands-on research - to learn about methodology while also trying to undertake a research project is simply too difficult, as even Rebecca admitted when she said that her micro-projects are designed to show students "how to fail" at research. But after a methods course, as novice researchers undertake their first empirical projects, they need dissertation and thesis directors who aren't so inundated with other work - their administrative roles, their teaching loads, their own research projects - that they can't truly mentor a new researcher through the process of an empirical inquiry. And novice researchers also need committees who insist on seeing multiple drafts, even at early stages, to understand how this young researcher will situate her/his research within the on-going scholarly conversation and if s/he can effectively describe and defend the methodologies s/he has used.

Without this one-on-one, hands-on guidance, the graduates from our rhet/comp MA and PhD programs are not going to be prepared, as I believe I was, to become successful empirical researchers. And empirical research is simply too vital to our field for us to let it slip through the cracks.

What can be done? Well, I think it comes down to a recognition that directing theses and dissertations of an empirical nature requires a different, more time-consuming approach than directing most library-based projects. Directors need to be careful how many graduate students they take on; they need to arrange their teaching and administrative loads to allow for this extra work, and they need to go before their department chairs and deans with arguments for more course and administrative releases to allow them to have more time for one-to-one mentoring.

Wherever possible, we also need to be connecting novice researchers with more experienced researchers, whether that be an MA student with a PhD student or any graduate student with other scholars through programs like the RNF. Directors can't do everything; we need excellent research mentorship, within and beyond our individual institutions, to ensure that our rhet/comp graduate students are prepared to be rigorous, successful researchers for the field.

Deciding where we stand

I ask my graduate students, most of whom are either English teachers or aspiring to be, to post responses to our weekly readings. I've been pleased with the online discussion their responses have generated, but sometimes, I'm also bemused by questions like this one:

"Is it possible," Student M. writes, "to not incorporate some of these ideas and STILL help students write?"

I smile, because the answer is obviously yes. Not everything we read for class every week is going to be applicable to our students, our institutions, our curricular goals. Yet the question makes me smile all the more because it is asked in relation to an article on teaching grammar - or, more to the point, an article against teaching grammar through the so-called "drill and kill" exercises common to English classes all over the United States.

The "grammar issue" is cyclical in the teaching of English. I think for the most part the field's theory has arrived at the conclusion that teaching formal grammar (i.e., identify the direct object in this sentence) has little to no impact on the grammar students use in their writing. But theoretical acceptance sometimes has slight pedagogical impact, and so long as our high-stakes testing for secondary ed students demands that they be able to diagram sentences and define parts of speech, high school English teachers are essentially forced into teaching grammar drill-and-kill style. And, to be honest, many college English teachers fall back on this method once we face the overwhelming number of comma splices and sentence fragments riddling our first-year writing students' essays. Our department even requires students to purchase a $100 grammar and mechanics handbook, although supposedly we as a field are "beyond" grammar.

Deciding where we stand as teachers is a difficult, delicate process, one that requires being exposed to the theory so we can even begin to formulate those positions. Still, in my student's desperate discussion board post, I hear the confusion theory can create in the classroom: What if I do this wrong? What if I don't implement my teaching in just this way? Are my students going to learn anything from me?

Composition theory is rife with internal contradictions and opposing viewpoints, much like its sister discipline literary theory. What makes teaching composition easier, though, is that we as a field have thus far resisted grabbing a "theory banner." It is possible to, as Wendy Bishop and Peter Elbow advocate, "range wide" in our pedagogy. Finding what works for a particular group of students means having a well-stocked toolbox of teaching strategies and a willingness to flexibly adapt one's teaching approach to each group of student writers. It means reflecting on our practices, why they work (why they don't) and how they work (how they don't). I hope, by the end of the term, that my graduate students understand this if nothing else: Like writing, the teaching of writing is an art, and there are many different paths to creating a masterpiece.