Can These Bones Live?

Can These Bones Live?

This week’s readings have really been resonating with me—especially Yancey’s—I suppose because she offers us something tangible to sink out pedagogy into. Besides her talking about a new comp/rhetoric major in practice, her suggestion of a new model of composition is refreshing. I have a lot of angst about the discipline—and its slipperiness, especially as it is influenced by digital comp and new media. The dissonance I feel is in part philosophical, in part aesthetic, and in part practical. The practical weighs heavily on me as I consider—each semester—how to teach comp. Each semester, I reinvent myself, promising I’ll never do “that” (what I did each last semester) again.

Next semester, I am using feminist thought as a vehicle to explore writing. I understand the why of this, but the how is a different story. I think that Yancey’s three-pronged approach to teaching comp will help me out a good deal—as will my experience of making last week’s movie. But Yancey’s triad of circulation, canons of rhetoric, and deixis will give me some pedagogical hooks on which to hang my hat.

I especially appreciate Yancey’s explication of how the practice of circulation might look in a classroom—staring with a student-composed definition of a term, say “feminism” for instance, then the student proceeding to remediate her own definition—not her own writing, so much as the knowledge she/we are producing as we interact with each student’s definition (I’m also glad to reading Schiappa’s Defining Reality at this time). Moving then to Power Point would help the students to see and feel how the medium shapes the writing, how text, medium and genre form/inform one another.

I think Yancey’s insight that “to study text production, reception, and meaning apart from animated activity is to miss the core” of a text’s meaning is exactly right. I have been wanting to start focusing in class theories of writing vis-à-vis practice, but have had some anxiety about how ready first and second-year students are for that kind of treatment. I think that, in fact, they ought to be “insiders” in terms of writing scholarship, questions in the discipline, conflicts and all.

Yancey’s treatment of the five canons, especially of invention, arrangement and delivery struck a chord with me because as I was composing in Movie Maker, I encountered the phenomenon she described. I had invented, but arrangement sent be back to invention again—as did delivery. In multimodal composition, recursivity plays very largely into the whole process.

As far as deixis, I’m still thinking.

I wholeheartedly agree with Yancey on another point: students ARE writing out of class—and no one is making them produce. We need to tap into that. So I’m still thinking. I think the idea is that their writing must live. We all know that writing for a class, fro a teacher, for a grade, for a requirement is dry-bones writing. We hate writing it. We hate reading it.