an accidental memory

. . . they are a changin’.  Again. Hopefully for the last time. So it’s time to prepare, right? Twelve days.

In other news: I’m almost moved into my new home. It had been 4.5 years since my last move, and I had really, really underestimated the amount of stuff I had to donate/sell/etc. Almost done!

I’m moving this weekend, and next week I’m finishing up my French translation class. Will I have time to get back to the blog afterward? Well, maybe I shouldn’t.

My last post suggests a sort of pedagogical reboot, for I was set to teach course #1 in our first year composition sequence alone–the one I hadn’t taught in years. This is still true, but instead of the admittedly cushy job at the Networked Writing & Research lab [which I love] occupying the second slot of my contractual obligations I will be teaching an additional section . . . of a different course. I got the call [er, email] about two minutes after hitting “Publish.”

Thus, something old, something new. I’ve taught both of these courses before but never at the same time. In fact, I’ve never had two courses to prepare for simultaneously; I’ve always taught two of the same section each semester or worked at our university writing center or the aforementioned NWR while teaching one. There are obvious advantages and disadvantages to two preps, and I wonder how my experience teaching each course next semester will inform the other. 

Today I read “Visualizing English: Recognizing the Hybrid Literacy of Visual and Verbal Authorship on the Web” by Craig Stroupe. One thing struck me in particular in his discussion of “Metaphoric Rocks” [which I have not read]:

While “Metaphoric Rocks” is written from within this protective circle of academic English, it also reflects an effort, expressed in entirely serious terms or not, to reach beyond its confines to a wider relevance. Working parallel to these cultural politics, Ulmer’s visual/verbal technique not only exemplifies the hybrid possibilities of electronic composition, but demonstrates a synthesis of poetic and rhetoric, the aesthetic and practical, which cuts across the lines of the English curriculum’s traditional “governing scheme.” (Handa, 35)

This excerpt follows a discussion of a particular kind of hybrid possibility of digital rhetoric, one in which images and words are both dialogical instead of, say, using an image to illuminate or illustrate whatever ideas are being presented textually (see also Bakhtin). This is something that I hadn’t given much thought. My background in technical communication typically leads me to consider more straightforward efforts at joining image+text, where the goal generally is to be as clear as possible and eliminate unwanted interpretive possibilities. But Stroupe positions digital/visual rhetoric as a bridge rather than a wedge, something I will have to keep in mind the next time a colleague teases me about my interest in all of “that technological stuff.” I am, of course, happy to be in a program where the vast majority of people embrace rather than resist analyzing and producing visual rhetoric in the composition classroom.

And here we go.

This fall I am set to teach a course I haven’t taught in four years. It’s Rhetoric & Composition I, typically considered to be more fun to teach than its second semester counterpart [which I have been exclusively teaching since]. I wonder if this reputation is warranted because it implies that Rhet/Comp II is somehow more of a burden to both students and instructors, probably due to its 8-10 page research paper requirement. Yet I have enjoyed teaching that course, and in the process of teaching it over and over I’ve been able to experiment with a lot of different things, taking on a new theme each semester as a means of keeping it fresh.

It’s exciting at first–I put in my book order with a vague idea of where I’d like the class to head, and in the month or so afterward I brainstorm ideas here and there. Yet I always feel a slight tinge of panic early August; I have to craft some sort of logical syllabus, and this is when I start kicking myself for venturing off in some new direction. In other words, I realize I have no idea what I am talking about.

But I do!–it just takes a while to come to terms with that, just as it takes some time to figure out what I need to brush up on before feeling fully capable of transmogrifying these ideas into some sort of teachable/transferable skill set.

This semester: visual rhetoric. However broad and amorphous it sounds right now, this is what I’ve signed up to do. I will use Seeing & Writing 4 by McQuade & McQuade, and the plan is to make my way through Carolyn Handa’s visual rhetoric anthology in hopes of understanding some of the theory behind what others are already doing in their pedagogy.

Sweet.