continuing thoughts on program design

February 16, 2006

2–3 minutes

I’ve been thinking that the challenges of new media literacy, the promises of online education, and the increased expectations of incorporating creative and intuitive approaches to rhetoric (along with the more traditional and rational practices of technical communication and basic composition) result in a serious behemoth of curriculum.

How could one do it all? Certainly not by imagining these items as discrete elements to be addressed serially (i.e., in a series of courses). Or at least, that element can be only one part of how a program is delivered. As such, I’m thinking about how our program can better incorporate other learning structures beyond the course into the undergraduate experience.

Here are a couple things that already exist for us (and probably are available or easily created elsewhere):

learning communities

service learning projects
literary magazines
online magazine
public readings
writers’ retreats
internships

The ideas is that these items identify sites outside the course where students might write and work, encounter students from other courses, and return to in future courses. It is not simply a matter, for example, of having creative writing students submit their work to the literary magazine. It’s the notion that participating as a poet in a community of writers seeking an audience of their work means being part of the production of a literary magazine. It means working with other writers, editing, designing and publishing, publicizing, and so on. It means supporting public readings and going on writers retreats.

Yes, obviously you can be Emily Dickinson if you wish, but then why did you come to college and major in professional writing to begin with? We see professional writing not about learning how to be a cloistered, romantic writer; it’s about becoming part of a profession and a community.

Courses in technical or business writing or community development might engage in service learning projects. Other courses might offer opportunities for doing work online. The point is that every course is part of some larger constellation of projects. And it’s important, I think, that it’s not always the same kind of thing, that it’s not always the literary magazine or the online magazine or whatever. That would get stale fast.

But at the same time (and this is something we might pursue more specifically) I think there is value in the idea of a central hub for these activities, a physical location but also a set of values, perhaps a sense of mission. After all, we are trying to suggest that the emerging professional writer is one who can see the value of poetics in designing instructional materials or narrative in web design, and in turn can see the value of rhetorical theory or new media production skills for more literary pursuits.

I guess my point is that I don’t see how we could possibly teach all these different things, if we imagine them primarily as a disparate bunch of items. We can only do it if we can imagine professional writing as one (discontinuous) thing that might be approached by many paths.

3 responses to “continuing thoughts on program design”

emily dickinson fbtg

February 20, 2006 at 2:28 pm

FYI: recent populist, revisionist “history” has it that ED wasn’t necessarily the recluse — “solitary self” — that everyone has made her out to be. She did seek out publication at one point after all, only to be told by “an eminent (male) literary figure” that her poems were “not for publication.” Perhaps the myth of the solitary genius is one transposed onto ED by the critics who cannot separate words from identity. I think context is everything in that case — life wasn’t easy for literary-oriented women in the 1800’s so solitude may not have been a conscious choice in the case of Dickinson as much as a by-product of the limited circumstances.
Attempted point being that the myth of the “solitary genius,” as pervasive as it is, is usually not the reality from the lived context of the writer — I would argue that most writers are readers by nature and thus part of a textual community by default. Yes, high school instruction often perpetuates those myths of the solitary writer — perhaps the job of university instruction is then to dismantle them, as you are doing.
Also, sometimes I think some students come from backgrounds wherein they were one of only a few writers in a small community. By the time that they have arrived on campus, they have learned to see themselves as (romantic) outsiders. All to say that their beliefs as to what it means to be a writer have been shaped by their histories and limited circumstances prior to arriving in univ. programs. There might be some value in exploring their assumptions about those histories as a way of leading them into another way of thinking about writing.

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Alex

February 20, 2006 at 6:36 pm

thanks for following up/clarifying the point about Emily Dickinson. I would suggest, regardless of biographical evidence, that the solitary genius is never as solitary as we might imagine. If someone wants to have a go at being solitary, I’m not going to stop them. It’s just that coming to a writing program would be a strange way to go about being solitary. But a good point about how the romantic notion comes about through the experience of isolation in H.S.
Speaking as “class bookworm” I’ll say the best thing about being isolated in HS is that you don’t share the many character flaws of popularity.
BTW, do you think that referring to Emily Dickinson as ED will get me hits for …you know that other masculine condition, something about knowing you don’t have it b/c you stood up and all the rest lie down?

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feminist mafia

February 21, 2006 at 5:12 pm

Very funny. Well, I was originally going to say that Emily Dickinson was not a shrinking violet after all. Ha.
Thank goodness that ED passed on into Immortality when Sigmund was still in his cocaine phase.
I still say that blogging is the collective unconscious emerging en masse. Repress, censor, repress, criticize, repress a la academia just doesn’t work to tame or stop the infinite river of virtual discourse anymore. Talking about that recent IHE op-ed, of course. How ironic.

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Alex Reid, professor of digital rhetoric, Media & Artificial Intelligence