Discourse Chronicle

An FAS study released this week, titled “Harnessing the power of video games for learning,” reports that best-selling games are built in surprisingly pedagogical ways. Players improve at their own pace. Beating a level requires experimentation, failure and learning from mistakes. -Nick Summers

[From Nick. BK]

category: Gaming, Pedagogy, Popular Culture, Technology    

Take a look at what passes for subjects of scholarly and instructional focus on campuses. Should taxpayer dollars really go to underwrite courses in such things as the history of comic book art? Policy makers and tuition payers need to be made aware of what sorts of courses institutions consider appropriate to fulfill core academic requirements, if anything resembling an academic core even exists. And there needs to be a greater emphasis on teaching students what they need to know, rather than what faculty want to talk about. -Eugene Hickok

[Thanks, Ted. I am obviously going to give an emphatic “Yes” to funding courses like history of comic book art. Comic studies are interdisciplinary and its applications are probably as flexible as rhetoric. However, increasing awareness and encouraging disciplines to dialogue with one another is a current goal, evidenced by the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate. I also disagree about faculty interests conflicting with students learning necessities. I always try and incorporate my research interests with comics and popular culture into my lessons as examples when teaching essential concepts such as composition or literature. BK]

category: Comics, Pedagogy, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics    

[I contemplate about whether or not having stampers with our frequently used comments on them such as “Comma splice – move clause and revise sentence” or “Pronoun disagreement” is more efficient than writing those out each time, but then our students may not be able to tell how much energy is invested into reading and commenting on papers.

A student forgot to pick up his homework from my stack along with his rough draft a few weeks ago because he said “it wasn’t green enough” referring to how much I dig into them. I only dig hard on rough drafts because a chance (albeit a small one) exists for my students to work on problems in revision, rather than no chance if I dig into final drafts since our students do not receive opportunities to revise once we complete a paper assignment.

I remember commenting on papers when I mentored as an undergraduate under Dennis G. Jerz with his freshman composition students and learning how to plow through papers thoroughly, yet efficiently. Efficiency equated to a total of six hours working with 30 papers, but four years later, my best is three hours with 24 papers. However, each new paper assignment seems to introduce other pitfalls for composition students to fall into along with common errors from previous work. BK]

category: Life, Pedagogy, Rhetoric and Poetics    

[I am in my office holding an extra day of office hours waiting for any students to come and ask for help before we turn in our first papers tomorrow. As I wait for anyone to visit, I am working on my coursework for next week along with blogging and checking things out on Facebook. I decided to try searching for my last name on Facebook and I found one student group called “Kuechenmeister’s class. Fall 2006.” I am beaming with pride as my students communicate with one another thinking I am not on Facebook. I view that as a badge of honor and I love it! BK]

category: Life, Pedagogy, Rhetoric and Poetics, Technology    

The campaign, which is run by the ecumenical charity Churches’ Advertising Network, aims to provoke debate about God among young people this Christmas.

[…]

The group, which has no formal links with the Roman Catholic Church or the Church of England, has ruffled feathers in previous years by depicting Jesus as Che Guevara. It has also portrayed the Last Supper as a boardroom meeting of multinational companies, with Judas as Microsoft.

The latest image of Jesus among the beer dregs is supposed to highlight the trend for finding religious faces in ordinary objects and selling them on eBay. Examples include the Virgin Mary on a toasted cheese sandwich. -Amy Iggulden and Alex Wellman

[I dislike blogging on religious issues or stating my faith publicly (especially in Texas), but here is an advertisement with rhetorical merit. I might use it when I teach English 104 again in the spring. Iggulden and Wellman also point out an accompanying MySpace page featuring this Jesus ad. BK]

category: Humor, Pedagogy, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics    

Not everyone is impressed by graphic novels. Some teachers refuse to assign them to their students, claiming they aren’t challenging to read. But many librarians and teachers stand by the books.

“Reading graphic novels leads to reading other things,” says Robin Brenner, a young-adult librarian with the Brookline Public Library in Massachusetts. “There’s a value in and of themselves, not just as a bridge to reading ‘real books.’ ” -Randy Dotinga

[Believing graphic novels are not sophisticated reading is a serious mistake and teachers who are refusing to use graphic novels on those grounds must be members of an uninformed persuasion. I am convinced people holding such an attitude are hindering scholarly progress each time I read an article making a similar statement.

I am wrapping up a four-week unit on Analyzing Visual Rhetoric with my freshman composition students next week and two things made it especially hard. First, high school curriculums divorce rhetoric from composition and only focus on the latter which leads to value being assigned to the final draft (product). Second, students lack a necessary background in rhetoric to discuss analysis and argument, so instructors must fuse rhetoric and composition again and emphasize the writing process. Theoretically, if we improve the process our students use to produce the product, then the product is improved as a result.

Brenner’s comment fuels the unnecessary negative stigma associated with comics and graphic novels by alluding to these texts as if they are gateway drugs, which may be an apt metaphor, if we substitute books for drugs. Comic books and graphic novels are capable of leading young readers to read increasingly difficult texts if we are willing to make connections between literature and comics or graphic novels, but I am thinking the answer lies in encouraging people to read. I know one reason I became an English major to begin with is because I knew if I did not, then I may never read texts most people encounter, but I also love reading. BK]

category: Comics, Literacy, Pedagogy, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics    

[Teaching my freshman composition students proved especially difficult for me this week because I noticed many of them are unable to remain interested during a full 50-minute period. Many students lose interest, fall asleep, or show visible signs of boredom about halfway through a period. Looking at such a situation as an instructor who is passionate about English studies (particularly rhetoric and composition), I instinctively blame myself and my presentation style, which leads me walking out of my class feeling less confident and that lack of confidence infects everything else I do. I feel like a failure at something I wanted to do since I can remember.

I imagine freshman students having a much harder time understanding rhetoric compared with me during my third year of undergraduate when I learned about it. Therefore, I spent one week on learning about rhetoric and the rhetorical situation; one week on reading visuals and argument; one week on basic composition and drafting; and then next week I plan on devoting one period to MLA citation and one period to peer review before my students turn in papers next Friday.

I hoped my students learned how to identify parts of the rhetorical situation, move from identification to explanation using sentences, change those sentences into an introduction, and then apply concepts of argument to develop body paragraphs analyzing details from their visual before providing a conclusion. I notice most of them succeeding at these tasks in their homework, but not in class. Maybe I am asking for too much or not guiding them enough…I feel like I failed teaching this unit. How will I teach my students to write the other three papers if I failed at the first one? BK]

category: Life, Pedagogy, Rhetoric and Poetics    

Some Christians question whether comics are appropriate for religious content. Some apparently shy away from the books because they think “graphic novel” means adult material. Some mainstream stores are reluctant to carry books appealing to what they view as a small niche. -Tonya Caldwell

[Why do people automatically assume that “graphic” means “adult”? I remember teaching literature students taking a course on The Novel that graphic novels differ from comic books in two significant ways. First is length since comic books are mostly 22 pages in length with a comfortable maximum number of panels being nine (graphic novels are at least 100 pages following a similar convention). Second is the audience because graphic novels are not targeting younger readers as a monthly comic book supposedly does. Instead, graphic novels target more mature readers and may not relate with its monthly title companion, which I taught separates graphic novels from trade paperbacks. BK]

category: Comics, Literacy, Pedagogy, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics    

[Today I experienced a breakthrough with my freshman composition class! I finally got them to understand what the “context” part of the rhetorical situation means. Last week, we spent time learning the parts and being able to identify them in a given packet of popular culture visuals from my collections, but I noticed in the homework some students struggled with the “message” and “context” part of the rhetorical situation. I worked with them today interactively on the 2-Disc Deluxe Edition Batman Begins DVD image and one of my students said, “So once the message is established, then the context is the support.” I made that student repeat what he had said and I beamed with pride because I managed to get them to overcome a hangup and it is only week two. BK]

category: Life, Pedagogy    

[Today my section of students in English 104: Composition and Rhetoric and I began our first “real” day of class. I say “real” day of class because we started working with rhetoric concepts from our textbooks. I am teaching a MWF section with 50 minutes each meeting and I wonder where the time goes. I planned on introducing the rhetorical situation (sender, receiver, message, context), starting to work with the rhetorical situation using a packet of sample visuals (Death of Superman cover, Lego Batcave ad, Batman Begins DVD cover and back, political cartoon about John Mark Karr), and show them Aristotle’s Model of Argument as a means of approaching how to react to visuals. I planned too much stuff into a 50-minute period.

I managed to introduce the rhetorical situation and identify its parts before launching into a group activity identifying the rhetorical situation in those sample visuals for 10 minutes, but that time vanished almost as soon as I said we were going to do it. However, good discussions resulted as one group debated about what “context” means when looking at an ad with an image and text, plus the group I worked with made a connection between detail in a visual and context. I feel proud about our beginnings because it tells me how to pace myself through these remaining three weeks and students are picking up on what I planned on. We did not make it to Aristotle’s Model of Argument.

Tentatively, I imagined Week 1 being about rhetoric and the rhetorical situation; Week 2 being about beginning college writing; Week 3 about research; and then Week 4 being about peer review as a precursor to turning in their first papers at the end of Week 4. Now I am thinking about spending two weeks on rhetoric and rhetorical situation and discussing basic college writing with research the following week. BK]

category: Pedagogy