Archive for the ‘Teaching’ Category
Engaging Student Commenting Practices in the Classroom: All Paper or Digital, Too?
My good friend, Matt Dowell, wrote a long, thoughtful comment on one of my posts from last week: “Reading, Writing, Marking, & Difficulty: Re-Reading Salvatori in Light of Digital Writing Practices.” I wanted to take some time and give his comment to attendant response it deserves. I posted it as a comment in the original post, but I thought it might warrant an entry all it’s own. I’ve changed the pronouns for readability, but the text is largely the same. Here is Dowell’s comment (followed by my response):
I find the last sentence of section 2a to be the most interesting portion of your post. Maybe because I’ve heard the rest of it from you before!
It seems to be that in one way, your argument that teachers should “consider the material/physical aspects of a students’ reading processes as an additional factor affecting the “difficulty” of a text” provides a possible answer to ideas you are presenting in section 1a and on the other hand it speaks back to the complications you raise in the same section.
I, to use one of your phrases, “totally totally agree with you” that we need to make the material/physical aspects of reading/writing more visible to our students and need to draw connections between physical/material reading. So, the most obvious answer is
Reading, Writing, Marking, & Difficulty: Re-Reading Salvatori in Light of Digital Writing Practices
At tomorrow’s pedagogy workshop here on campus (2.17.10), we’ll be reading and discussing Mariolina Salvatori’s College English article “Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of Composition” (1996). While acknowledging that I’m oversimplifying, I want to mention four important points in the article, and think through them (now, 14 years later) in terms of pedagogy inflected by digital writing tools. Salvatori herself describes the project of her article as “an argument on behalf of the theoretical and practical appropriateness of using ‘reading’ as a means of teaching ‘writing’” (441). Within this frame, she works through several related ideas; I’d like to think though the following four:
1. One of the activities she often asks students to work through is to reflect on their own mark-making practices as active readers of a text, and then to consider what those marks – the nature of the marks, what gets marked, what doesn’t–might reveal about knowledge-making practices, reading, and writing.
2. Another activity she asks her students to engage in is to describe and analyze the difficulty that certain texts present in reading. What moves are difficult to engage, what types of knowledge or warrants are challenging, etc. Then students can reflect on their process by sharing it with other students/teacher and offer a more concrete, specific strategy for reflecting on reading and writing practices. Read the rest of this entry »
Digital Literacy, Competence, and the Necessity of Inexperience: A Forward/Reflection on Alex Reid
Just finished reading Alex Reid’s blog, where he’s posted a response to a passage in the Horizon Report, produced by The New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE. I’m particularly interested in reflecting on Reid’s engagement with the Horizon Report’s use of the term literacy.
I sense that Reid is somewhat resistant to the grafting a one term, literacy, with its history as a socially valorized term in particular contexts, onto a much more contemporary—and only selectively related—digital context. Literacy originally emerged as a key cultural term in reference to print texts (most often implying some relationship to reading and writing books and letters). I won’t deny that there are some pretty clear analogs between the two contexts (printed texts vs. digital texts). And I share Reid’s skepticism about the (what I would characterize as) too-easy appropriation of the culturally-loaded term into what often seem to be overt rhetorical strategies for legitimizing digital media studies. Here are three quotes from Reid’s post:
It is increasingly difficult to imagine arguing that college students will not be using digital media as students, professionals, and citizens for many purposes that will partly supplant as well as extend the way prior generations used books, paper, pens, typewriters, libraries, televisions, newspapers, lecture halls, and even higher education itself. As an industry, as institutions, and as faculty we remain ill-prepared to meet these changing conditions.
