Research
The following is an excerpt from a project I am working on with Patricia Ericsson. Like my dissertation, this piece explores the impact of new media on family.
Excerpt
We begin this text fully aware of being in the “middle of things,” heeding the continuing calls from composition scholars to “pay attention” to our technological middle-of-thing-ness, and with a strong commitment to an underconsidered educational scene of our theory and practice: family as our first composition classroom. In a 2009 College Composition and Communication article Cynthia Selfe invites scholars and teachers to “pay attention to,
and come to value, the multiple ways in which students compose and communicate
meaning…” (642). For Selfe, ignoring or censoring students from composing and analyzing a variety of semiotic modes is a disservice to students. She writes
Young people need to know that their role as rhetorical agents is open, not artificially foreclosed by the limits of their teachers’ imaginations. They need a full quiver of semiotic modes from which to select, role models who can teach them to think critically about a range of communication tools, and multiple ways of reaching their audience. They do not need teachers who insist on one tool or one way (645).
While we agree with Selfe that there is value in composing in a number of semiotic modes besides alphabetic text and that this is a valuable and important endeavor in composition classrooms, we feel the modes or arrows in her “quiver” need a target. We believe that along with a “quiver of semiotic modes” students need topoi for situating their learning. To think critically and actively, it is not enough to have role models for emulation—students need to transfer the knowledge they already possess regarding semiotic modes to new situations and employ and expand models they have been using. Perhaps students do need more arrows/modes in their quivers, but we argue that in addition to familiarity with multiple modes, they need to know that they know these modes. To be “rhetorical agents,” students must be empowered not only with a full repertoire of modes, but with an awareness of the burgeoning bag of rhetorical tricks, tropes, and modes that they have already internalized and learned in their first rhetoric and composition classroom: their families.
