Goals for the Writing Classroom

Solitary writers (Source: Microsoft Office Design Gallery)Our students need to learn to analyze the visual, spatial, and temporal (as well as textual) forms that connect (or separate) ideas, whether the forms those ideas take are delivered as a television broadcast, a magazine ad, a Web page or Instant Message, the instructions for downloading an MP3 file, or an academic (for-print) essay.  The most important consideration for all of these acts is still that it meet the needs of a reader. To accomplish this, writers need to explicitly consider the effect of elements of design that, for most traditional academic projects, have been taken for granted.  Instead, we need to help our students understand how to make these decisions, based on rhetorical exigencies, choosing from an astonishing array of never-before-possible elements, as well as helping them to understand how more traditional elements may or may not work in a digital era.

Such a focus on teaching form can be (is?) justified by considering the outcomes we wish to achieve.  The Outcomes Statement adopted by the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA) "describes the common knowledge, skills, and attitudes sought by first-year composition programs in American postsecondary education."  I'd like to begin by focusing on two of these outcomes:

—>Students' ability to "[u]se a variety of technologies to address a range of audiences."

One way we can assist our students to learn to "use" technologies is to focus on the connections between what our students are already doing (as soon as we can figure out what that may be) and more "traditional" (e.g., academic) forms, encouraging students to see Television clip art (Source: Microsoft Office Design Gallery)how all of these forms are determined as a response to a specific rhetorical situation.  In other words, by focusing our pedagogy on the ability to critically engage "texts" in a variety of formats, we can help foster a sense of how meaning is constructed that is not dependent on any specific technology.  There is no reason, then, to have students turn off the television.  Students do have some experience using various technologies already.  For example, most of our students know how to open a Web browser, enter a URL, or recognize and click on a hypertext link.  If we were teaching only "skills," this would be enough.  Of course, we need to help students understand how the hardware, the software, the form, and the content work together to meet the needs of its audience.  But is it necessary for students to author content in order to learn to "address a range of audiences" using a "variety of technologies"?

—>Students' ability to "[u]nderstand the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes."

We can help students learn to enter the scholarly conversation by helping them to understand that all writing is inherently collaborative and social. That is, the knowledge bases we rely on to formulate our own so-called original ideas are predicated on the voices of others.  Moreover, it is only in response to our conceptions of a reader's possible questions or reactions to our arguments that we can write at all. Technology, of course, can help to facilitate collaboration in (and beyond) the writing classroom.  And yet, many of our classrooms are built to work against collaboration: our students may log in to a chat room where they talk to each other through the medium of text in online spaces which have been carefully configured so that only students in the same classroom can interact, while at the same time they sit in nice, neat rows, ensuring that the physical act of "writing" is a solitary experience, and the use of other people's words in their writing projects is strictly controlled.

Every semester, our discussion lists turn again and again to the subject of plagiarism.  In a recent thread on one of the listservs I subscribe to, however, some people argued for the value of copy-and-paste writing, a form of collaborative writing which appropriates the words and ideas of others.  We even have a rhetorical history behind this—the use of copy books, where students meticulously hand-copied the writing of venerables, with the hope that, by so doing, they would not only reinforce their remembering and understanding of these works but would also learn to emulate the rhythms and patterns of writing therein.

Why not teach students to copy-and-paste an essay? Two reasons, of course, spring immediately to mind:
    1. Copying and pasting electronically does not have the same effect on learning as does handwriting, or even typing.  One can copy-and-paste without reading and certainly without remembering or understanding.
    2. The primary problem I see with student writing will not be solved by copying-and-pasting:  Until students can organize the bits they borrow, they might just as well be copying and pasting already—or not.
         
    However, we can use this idea in conjunction with explicit discussion of form, of intellectual property (and rhetorical considerations of how and why we cite sources), and the requirements of various rhetorical situations (e.g., how content may need to be presented in order to suit specific purposes, for different audiences and occasions, and for various media).  Hence, a student composing a project would need to make his or her purpose clear, would need to consider which arguments and evidence are necessary and effective for the targeted audience, how to ensure that the reader can locate information, etc.).  But students can (and sometimes  already do) accomplish these (miraculous) feats without composing a single word themselves....
     
         
        —>Picture this:  a networked writing classroom where students focus on learning form, learning how communicative acts are structured and designed for a variety of rhetorical situations, where students use whatever means are appropriate to the situation to add content, collaborating (shamelessly?) with others, wherever (and whomever) those "others" might be.
 
 
To the end Making Rhetoric Visible (Visual Rhetoric?)