Political and idealogical leanings aside, yes, yes I am a consumer... But I am also a producer!
I think.
The relationship between being a writer, a teacher of writing, a consumer of writing, and now a producer of UGC is reality-shaking. The complex relationship occurring here: the four-way love-hate relationship that students--as well as teachers--have to learn to navigate in order to become "learned" citizens of the 21st Century is a soul-searching mission. At stake is how we interact with texts, how we write, and how effective we will be in the classroom. It's no wonder that traditional academia is unsure of how to approach our new ways of reading, writing, producing, and consuming. It should also be no wonder that approaching texts from a strictly linear perspective is not going to make our students better writers or students. (I think our antiquated forms of teaching, the lecture, the book report, and the multiple-choice exam only seek to produce students that are the worst kind of consumers, blind consumers.)
I'd never thought of reading or of engaging with a text as an act of consuming. This is perhaps naive on my part. Since for the most part, reading involves the purchase of the book or the technology necessary to read the book. But I've also always approached reading, and writing for that matter, as this abstraction of the human experience: a concerted effort involving textual stimuli and whether or not I could process that stimuli in my brain for me to invest time with a particular text. I did not grow up "loving" books; it was something I grew to love, but only because I began to learn about the creation of texts simultaneously. (This happened as an undergrad at Queens College.) I wonder what Manovich would say about this: the reader who could only become a reader as he learned to produce (somewhat...) art in the form of texts. (A rapidly evolving art form no less!) But even more so, I wonder about the complicated love I have with reading and writing: and the role it's played in how I engage in both those acts, and how teach students to do so as well.
"We are too much ourselves when we teach." This is something I would say if asked what prevents the teacher from being the best she/he can be.
The same way I have had to learn that I cannot teach composition from the perspective that every student can and should be a fiction writer, we cannot think that our students can and should only read books and scholarly articles and plagiarize (expletive coming) the shit of the work of others and claim it as their own. UGC and the remix generation is here to stay--we might as well find a way to incorporate it into our pedagogy.
Now more than ever we find ourselves needing to understand our roles as consumers in our materialistic, capitalistic, etc., etc. society. But now, as a result of technology, we all can be producers of something. (I hesitate to use the word art knowing that it still, and perhaps will always, hold a special personal meaning.) And perhaps in the producing of content, written texts, videos, remixes, songs, visual, audio and multimedia and multiplatform works, we are becoming smarter consumers. And if we as teachers of composition and rhetoric can play a role in creating a better student (which is what June Jordan and Mina Shaughnessy were thinking, no?) than we have to embrace Web 2.0. Because teaching cannot be entirely about our experiences, can it?
I think.
The relationship between being a writer, a teacher of writing, a consumer of writing, and now a producer of UGC is reality-shaking. The complex relationship occurring here: the four-way love-hate relationship that students--as well as teachers--have to learn to navigate in order to become "learned" citizens of the 21st Century is a soul-searching mission. At stake is how we interact with texts, how we write, and how effective we will be in the classroom. It's no wonder that traditional academia is unsure of how to approach our new ways of reading, writing, producing, and consuming. It should also be no wonder that approaching texts from a strictly linear perspective is not going to make our students better writers or students. (I think our antiquated forms of teaching, the lecture, the book report, and the multiple-choice exam only seek to produce students that are the worst kind of consumers, blind consumers.)
I'd never thought of reading or of engaging with a text as an act of consuming. This is perhaps naive on my part. Since for the most part, reading involves the purchase of the book or the technology necessary to read the book. But I've also always approached reading, and writing for that matter, as this abstraction of the human experience: a concerted effort involving textual stimuli and whether or not I could process that stimuli in my brain for me to invest time with a particular text. I did not grow up "loving" books; it was something I grew to love, but only because I began to learn about the creation of texts simultaneously. (This happened as an undergrad at Queens College.) I wonder what Manovich would say about this: the reader who could only become a reader as he learned to produce (somewhat...) art in the form of texts. (A rapidly evolving art form no less!) But even more so, I wonder about the complicated love I have with reading and writing: and the role it's played in how I engage in both those acts, and how teach students to do so as well.
"We are too much ourselves when we teach." This is something I would say if asked what prevents the teacher from being the best she/he can be.
The same way I have had to learn that I cannot teach composition from the perspective that every student can and should be a fiction writer, we cannot think that our students can and should only read books and scholarly articles and plagiarize (expletive coming) the shit of the work of others and claim it as their own. UGC and the remix generation is here to stay--we might as well find a way to incorporate it into our pedagogy.
Now more than ever we find ourselves needing to understand our roles as consumers in our materialistic, capitalistic, etc., etc. society. But now, as a result of technology, we all can be producers of something. (I hesitate to use the word art knowing that it still, and perhaps will always, hold a special personal meaning.) And perhaps in the producing of content, written texts, videos, remixes, songs, visual, audio and multimedia and multiplatform works, we are becoming smarter consumers. And if we as teachers of composition and rhetoric can play a role in creating a better student (which is what June Jordan and Mina Shaughnessy were thinking, no?) than we have to embrace Web 2.0. Because teaching cannot be entirely about our experiences, can it?
No comments:
Post a Comment