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.