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Push out the walls!

So-

Love Diana George's aim of opening our eyes to why we haven't put more Viz Rhet in our classes. Killer. All about the eye-opening.

But how much can we do this? How many one-ups can we perform (e.g. the comp-rhet ideology argument with Berlin that gets bigger and bigger forever) before we're taking TOO MUCH into our comp classes, or are we already there? Cue ominous music.

Sacrilege, I know.

Submitted by magnoliafan on Tue, 2007-03-27 09:50.
magnoliafan's blog

Fair question
Ryan's picture
Submitted by Ryan on Thu, 2007-03-29 10:13.

I agree, Lars, that we risk taking on too much in our comp classes. For one, this lack of focus leads to bad pedagogy when our classes are a half cocked survey of every conceivable medium of rhetoric. It also threatens our domain, as Adryan comments. As much as I value the visual, I worry about our classes turning into half ass filmmaking classes. That is why I think we need to keep a focus on language, whichever direction we go.


Fair Answer
nrivers's picture
Submitted by nrivers on Thu, 2007-03-29 10:34.

I find that the more I teach the more I count coherence as the most important quality of pedagogy. Do a couple of things and do them often and in multiple ways. As with any project, I agree that it is valuable in so far as it fits in with the larger scheme of the course. I don't have an exclusively visual assignment, but I do try to have more explicitly visual components of assignments.

After reading George, I wonder if this reaffirms the secondary nature of visual rhetoric. I wonder if the distinction is between arguing through visual rhetoric (my approach) and thinking through visual compositions (George's approach).


Tough
magnoliafan's picture
Submitted by magnoliafan on Thu, 2007-03-29 10:49.

This is a tough one. Do we ultimately make students put it into words?


At what point do/should
Morgan S.'s picture
Submitted by Morgan S. on Thu, 2007-03-29 10:55.

At what point do/should students put into words what they are considering? At what point should words be brought into the composing process?


All the time / at perfect moments
magnoliafan's picture
Submitted by magnoliafan on Tue, 2007-04-03 10:05.

It seems like the two options in terms of time are 1) all the time (constant blogging) or 2) with commentaries attached to the major projects before and/or after they're completed, explaining what they're doing and why they do things as they are. People try to do both in classes (Santos's classes are supposed to have an insane amount of this type of writing), but the risk is that students just make crap up if they're asked to write too much. Or even if they're only asked to write a little bit.

L-Train


Rhetoric and Composition is it's own content!
Adryan's picture
Submitted by Adryan on Tue, 2007-03-27 10:35.

The drive alluded (and submitted) to in George's article, to make our class relevent to students and to justify ourseves as "cutting edge" assumes that an introductory composition class has no actual content. It's a bad feedback loop.