My name is Ryan Trauman. I am veteran of five or six DMACs.
I’m Suzanne Blum Malley and I attended DMAC at The Ohio State University in 2009.
Corrine Calice and I went to CIWIC at Michigan Tech University in, I think it was 2000.
I’m Jonn Salovaara and I went to DMAC at Ohio State in 2009.
I’m Pegeen Reichert-Powell and I have not attended CIWIC or DMAC.
I’m Ames Hawkins and I went to CIWIC—Michigan Tech—I think it was 2004.
I. Conversations
Only minutes into our conversation I noticed the repeated use of a particular word in a variety of forms: OPEN. So when I got ahold of the recordings, I listened for the word. Over the course of our 97-minute conversation, the word open is used in a variety of contexts.
Corrine: There’s this fluidity of intimacy and a kind of relaxed openness Corrine: She really does open, like, her personal spaces Corrine: She’s just so open Corrine: Really open, welcoming, wonderful, collaborative, kind of hominess Suzanne: It’s done with such openness Suzanne: It’s an openness Suzanne: A kind of openness Suzanne: that opens the space for an intellectual conversation Corrine: and a kind of openness Corrine: a willingness and openness to say well, OK Suzanne: Opening a space for that discomfort Jonn: And it also opens up this other area where students have this expertise that I don’t have Pegeen: I mean I’m really leaving this open Suzanne: It’s opening up our print-domination to making room Jonn: you know being a student again, and being open to trying a new platform Suzanne: If you do that, then you open up, you open up the space for that to happen
Eighteen different times. (montage of the word open)
As I listened to the conversation, I thought about the power and place of this word in our profession. I thought about the positive spin we’ve given it; the assumptions we make regarding the capacity and capability of this idea.
I thought about how, in the past ten years or so, we’ve built a mini-discourse around the word: (Fade these words in and out: Open access Open source, Open Science, Open Admissions, Open University, Open Classroom)
I thought about all of the metaphors and sayings we use that are associated with this idea—how we use and speak about what can be open, what might be dangerous or desirable when open. (Fade all of these words in and out: Open arms, Open mind, Open heart, Open mouth, Open book, Open season Open floodgates, Opening a can of worms open-and-shut case opening old wounds open marriage, keeping options, open to criticism, open to question, open to the possibilities, blown wide open)
And in doing so, I thought about what it means to open. I thought about how and where and when and why I have been in relationship with this idea—being OPEN, OPENED, being both a part of OPEN and apart from this idea of/to be/willingly OPEN. I though about the projects I’ve been working with in some way shape or form for the past five years, how these two ideas overlap, and I thought about how and where and when it is we need to give, how hard we need to press, how there is always—ALWAYS—even when you can’t quite see it, when you don’t quite know it, a break, or rupture, a rip, tear, or cracking, associated with the opening.
II. Spaces
From 1978-1981, I was a student in an Open Classroom at Defer Elementary in the Grosse Point Public School System. All open classrooms were on the first floor of the building. From the front entrance you took a flight down. The partially subterranean sensibility of the space made it feel like a secret, our own private cave, an underground cavern, the hall a river, a river that led directly out the side door to our playground sea.
It was clear to me from the beginning that my peers and I were somehow more important, better than the other children in the regular classrooms on the two other floors above that always seemed so far away.
We were the chosen ones. We were privileged ones, a sense of privilege made clear by a lack of structure, rules and regulation regarding management of our bodies and attention in time and space. Each week on Monday we’d be given goals in terms of school work, all that needed to be checked in no later than after lunch on Friday.
In our open classroom I reveled in not having to follow along with the rest of the class in lock-step motion, trusted by the teacher, institution and system as fully capable, able to make decisions concerning things like time-management and writing topics.
In our open classroom we discovered much of each day as a space for play engaging in an elaborate collaborative RPG called pencil family, battling in an veritable Olympics of pen wars, paper football and penny hockey. In our open classroom I enjoyed the freedom of being as productive as I liked, usually finishing all my work sometime around Wednesday, in order to get to the reward: An ability to choose how to spend my time for the remainder of the week—creating bulletin boards, working in the kindergarten room, perhaps shelving books in the library. In our open classroom, I was able to thrive.
In our open classroom there kids for whom the freedom to choose appeared more than they could handle as long about Thursday they’d be buried in a mountain of work, the threat of sanctions close at hand: no recess, no personal reading time, no permission to leave the room. In our open classroom, in our middle upper middle basically all white grade school I never recall debating an issue or idea, or negotiating rules or governance, or being asked our opinion in any direct way.
To the space provided by the now extinct experiment of the American open classroom, I can trace my beginnings of a simultaneous becoming of rhetorician, academician, artist, teacher, activist, citizen.
III. Letters
Rather than using envelopes, Emily Dickinson preferred to fold her letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, sometimes in quarters, sometimes in thirds. Many exhibit pinholes, the tiniest of openings; traces of Emily’s material relationship with these missives. She’d often pin them inside the pocket of her apron or dress waiting until it could be delivered. Sometime she’d hand the letter to a child in the family, or someone working in the home, and have them deliver the letter to Susan. Emily and Susan lived next door to one another.
I sit and think about the one sweet directive written in the fold of a letter from June 1852: Open me, carefully. A delicate bidding; tender instruction, clarified by the sentiment that Susan do so at once, full of care. I imagine Susan detecting the energetic shadow of Emily’s touch, tracing folds with fingers, hand with eye, and in this mirroring moment I find myself in compositional communion with Emily imagining her trust.
Here, here are my words. Please be gentle with them. I am made vulnerable here for you on the page. Open, please, open. But know that when you do, I will be splayed wide exposed for your consideration, as a rupture of words and ideas and language now contained, soon to be dangerously unfurled.
I recall rolling the word open around and around in my head so many times during our recording session that it began to lose its prepositional quality, transmogrifying into a declaration of sweet delight. Open, open OPEN—O-Pen! And then proper clarification: Oh, Pen! Oh, Pen, My Pen! Oh, how wonderful it is to pen!
I consider a short passage from Mary Glibride’s master’s thesis on the open classroom: “Teachers need to know themselves and their children better if they are to teach in an open manner. They must begin to explore their own beliefs and values and behaviors. They must provide legitimate ways to express belief in the classroom.”
I regard bell hooks’ advice as admission regarding how it is to teach to transgress: “In my classrooms I do not expect students to take any risks that I would not take, to share in any way that I would not share.”
I understand Anais Nin writing to Henry Miller: “I have become an idiot like Gertrude Stein. That’s what love does to intelligent women. They cannot write letters anymore.”
And I think about how it is we might open ourselves to each other. And I think a good place to start is thinking about what it means to be open. To open to, with, for, because of, in writing, in opening writing, in opening ourselves.
IV. Wide
Suzanne: I’m sorry, am I boring you?
Pegeen: No, I am wondering whether he can hear me chewing. Can he hear me chewing the cherries??
Laughter/voices
Ames: Isn’t that the most delicious cherry?
Suzanne: Those are the best…those are the best cherries in the world and you should chew that other one or it’s gonna be gone!
Laugher/voices
Pegeen: I will!
Laugher/voices
Corrine: That’s a $22 jar of cherries there.
Laughter/voices
Pegeen: I’m sorry Suzanne!
Laughter/voices
Suzanne: So….
Laughter/voices
Ames: …we talked about that…
Laughter/voices
Jonn: …it’s just natural…
Laughter/voices
Ames: …I do not want to whip through this….
Laughter/voices
Ames: …unbelievable!
Laughter/voices
Four of my Columbia College Chicago colleagues and I sat down with our WPA to discuss the ways in which our experiences at different CIWICs & DMACs have shaped our professional activities and how those experiences might suggest best practices for programmatic change in the first-year writing program at our institution. In a frequency analysis of our extended, and recorded, conversation, I found several repeated key words that offer a lens for analysis for what I perceive as some of the most important take-aways from my experience at DMAC 2009.
Discomfort and resistance, coupled with the specter of perceived loss of expert status came time and again in the conversation with my colleagues and in interviews I conducted with DMAC participants during the 2009 institute. For me one of the key aspects of the DMAC experience is the way in which the institute is structured to allow participants to overcome fear and resistance to new, less expert for the most part, ways of composing by, essentially, pushing them to uncomfortable spaces to DO the work.
Even the most reluctant user of digital technologies might find her/himself inching just a bit toward opening up to digital modalities after an hour or two in conversation with Cindy Selfe about widening the bandwidth of literacies.
[Cindy Selfe DMAC 2009 Transcript]
Now, sometimes I think that Aristotle is ahead of his time. When Aristotle talks about Rhetoric and Communication, he talks about "all available means." Alright. He didn't talk about PRINT as the available means, but of course that was one of the things he was using. He talked about all available means of communication and I think that that phrase, to me, has more weight and substance now than it has had in a long time. If we think about semiotic channels as carrying different parts of the information in that process. Um, now it has never been more important than now that we use multiple semiotic channels.
She makes sense and, importantly, she makes it seem doable. In essence, Cindy is able to justify the need for change AND to, somehow, reassuringly reduce the specter of risk associated with that change. The ability to reduce the perceived risk of making a change to digital and multimodal teaching and engage with the material enactment of that change is essential for the wide-scale digitization of the writing classroom.
The material practice of enactment, then, is one of the best ways for teachers of writing to confront the personal anxieties that surround the idea of digital composing.
In what follows, I share three of videos I created during DMAC 2009 that I believe get at how doing the work might address the anxieties so often associated with digital composing by writing teachers who are new to it. I thank my fellow DMAC 2009 co-conspirators from what will likely always be known as the Sophie year for their generosity of time, spirit, and intellect, which is so characteristic of the DMAC/CIWIC experience.
[Alanna Frost Day 1 Transcript]
I was feeling very nervous and I was surprised at how anxious I was as the day progressed. From the beginning I was feeling anxious, um, and I was surprised at how anxious I got as we learned more and more things because I felt so inadequate. It was such a good reminder, if I can reflect on it for a second, such a good reminder of the classroom when we give students the entire semesters’, you know, worth of work and what they are going to accomplish by the end. And they look at us like we’re crazy. That’s how I felt. I just felt like I can't. I can’t do this. I can’t, I can’t, I know I can’t.
[Doing the Work of DMAC VideoTranscript] /p>
Music: Fixing My Brain by Brad Sucks.
Lyrics
Rubber rooms and taking funny pills
Filling up on notes and dollar bills
It's the price you pay for feeling okay
You're the strangest girl I've ever met
Sending weird signals to my head
I've been thinking about fixing my brain
But I'm afraid I won't feel the same
'Cause baby it's all I do
I've been thinking about fixing my brain
But I'm afraid I won't feel the same
'Cause baby it's all I do
I've been thinking about fixing my brain
But I'm afraid
[Alanna Frost Day 7 Transcript]
I have to say I’m feeling a little more like I can. You know, I think the small finger exercises were extremely helpful in …these things, helping me navigate through the technology. Um, I know now because I them that I can put together something by Monday that has visual components to it and sound and movement, maybe. Um, so I’m feeling…trepi…sense…I’m feeling a tentative sense of peace.
[on screen] A Tentative Peace
It is possible to address some of the anxieties surrounding digital, multimodal, and networked composing by continuing to make the unfamiliar more comfortable and pushing ourselves and others to do the work. With thirty-plus years of scholarship in the field of computers and writing, this reflection on the legacy of CIWIC/DMAC points to Jenny Edbauer Rice’s call for us to attend to our affective rhetorical ecologies.
Ultimately, for me, doing the work of CWIC/DMAC is not the work of learning the specific ins and outs of a particular platform or tool. Since June 2009, I have never attempted another Sophie book. I do, however, continue to push myself to craft digital, multimodal scholarship and I have integrated digital, networked aspects of composing, learning all the while myself, into every one of my writing classrooms. The real work of CIWIC/DMAC is participation in a learning environment that, in the words of Jenny Edbauer Rice, “engages processes and encounters” (Jenny Edbauer “Reframing” p. 23). It must also be a learning environment that encourages risk-taking and the confrontation of fears in a generous, hospitable space, and that asks us all to make room for adaptations or mutations of what we consider our expertise in exciting new ways.
Spending two weeks in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan at CIWIC in 2000 was like going to grown-up summer camp. We had classes, of course, but we also had bon fires, pot lucks, boat rides, movie night and golf outings. Along the way we swapped stories about teaching, learned new technologies, worked on projects and made new friends.
I came home from CIWIC as a lecturer at a mid-sized Midwestern university energized and ready to build some exciting, media-rich hybrid courses for First Year Writing. But there was a problem: the university’s license for its learning management system (LMS) was held exclusively by Distance Education. Regular campus faculty weren’t allowed to use it.
My solution? Cobble together a makeshift course space McGuyver-style by creating a class website that housed course content and linked it to free public discussion board and chat applications. OK< good for me, but now I was on a kind of a mission to crack the safe and gain access to the technological coffers, not only for myself but for my department, too. I saw the sequestering and/or hoarding of resources as a kind of institutional microaggression against individual faculty innovation.
Typically applied to race, gender, and sexual orientation politics, I am suggesting here that early adopters whose teaching practices challenge the tradition of a university education receive a similar kind of othering on campus that could result in a faculty member self-censoring or limiting the degree to which they are willing to push campus policies or advocate for new approaches to teaching which, if it were not resisted would result in stagnation both in pedagogy and in the campus culture.
The next year I sought grant funds from the Center for Teaching Excellence to buy out course space and technical support from Distance Ed to literally spread the wealth so that the English Department could launch a new hybrid First Year Writing curriculum. I volunteered to build out three “master” course templates fully loaded with goodies like content, prompts, assignments, tutorials, rubrics, gradebook, etc. that faculty would be able to use as-is or customize for themselves.
One on one help sessions with every faculty member in the program and we were off and running!. We ended up having a 100% faculty compliance with using WebCT and nearly every instructor chose to customize their sites, bringing their own theory and content into their personal course space.
When I moved to Chicago and took a job at Columbia College Chicago as an adjunct instructor in 2004 I learned that while research in digital media studies was encouraged, teaching along the cutting edge of technology and pedagogy was not. Some years hybrid or online courses were listed in the course catalogue and some years when we were told that we weren’t allowed to teach hybrid or online courses; that the terms of our teaching agreement included meeting our students face to face twice a week regardless of what we might be having students do with that time.
I wanted my students to work together to collaboratively author a digital book. Columbia’s LMS was quirky and unreliable and didn’t have any collaboration tools built in except for a discussion board. To solve this problem students worked together to choose technologies that would suit their goals for the project. They chose to construct individual blogs and bring them together as a collection under a central home page that served a bit like a table of contents; they created a class voicethread site to which everyone contributed pages and commentary; they attempted to create a complex group prezi that presented the highlights of a term’s worth of research (this didn’t work so well). One semester a student used interview data to write a piece of documentary theater that was staged in a student gallery space and video taped the production to be posted to the web.
Over time, I’ve felt less and less like an exotic teacher-creature that had to hide my pedagogy in the briar patch as the institutional landscape has become more innovation-friendly. We ditched the old LMS in favor of Moodle and in the last 5 years I have been asked to host several summer faculty development workshops and serve as an online education mentor and personal help-mate for faculty who want to jump onboard but need a little support with the technology.
What I’ve noticed is a gradual shift in resource allocation and support that creates an environment that is safe enough for faculty to take a leap into unfamiliar territory and make things up as we go along, moving back and forth between theory and practice. The institution is starting to see the potential benefit of pedagogies that empower students to compose in ways that are not inherently loaded in the institution’s favor (TRADITION) but rather feature personal investment in the composition itself and re-position the writing classroom as a gateway rather than a gatekeeper in higher learning.
Slide one: text only, reads--
Cracks in the alphabetic pavement: my own path toward multi-modal composing Photos and text by Jonn Salovaara
Slide two: image fills entire slide--parts of two sidewalk pavement blocks horizontally divided in mid-frame by tarry separator, with two prominent vertical cracks, one down left of center, one up right of center. Sport shoe viewed from above and shadow of walker’s ankle in lower right.
Superimposed text reads—
My path toward multi-modal composition has been not been flawless.
Slide three: text only, reads—
I started down that path by going to DMAC in 2009. Before I went, I had never uploaded a digital photo; I don’t think I’d even taken a digital photo; I know I borrowed my daughter’s digital camera to bring with me. I also had an old, small-screen laptop on which it was impossible to see the whole Sophie interface at one time--Cindy Selfe got frustrated with my laptop when she was trying to help me. I didn’t even realize how old it was, nor how often one was really supposed to update a computer.
I am a very late adopter, if not an actual Luddite.
One important result of DMAC was that I requested a better computer from my department. I felt that I was justified in asking for this because I was still trying to finish my Sophie Book project. And I did finish it later that summer, after I got the new laptop. Though my project was primitive, it was the crowning glory of my work at DMAC. The video interviews I conducted for my Sophie Book, asking other DMAC participants for their definitions of culture and for stories related to culture, I have shared with my ethnographic writing classes. Some of those interviews have been especially effective in getting students to think about culture.
Slide four: image fills entire slide—funnel-shaped break in sidewalk pavement, opening toward right of slide, left half of funnel sandy with a bike tire imprint, right half growing with green clover and crabgrass and two small clover flowers.
Superimposed text reads-- So, at DMAC, there was a flowering in my use of the multi-modal.
Slide five: image fills entire slide—diagonal crack in sidewalk pavement running lower left to upper right, filled with green crabgrass
Superimposed text reads— And after my first project there, I continued another on my own—I still felt like my multi-modal composing was growing.
Slide six: image fills entire slide—in the middle, horizontal tarry separator halfway across left to right, with cracks just above it, then a triangular void in the pavement, filled with sand, gravel, and small green weeds
Superimposed text reads— But, when I tried teaching multi-modal composing, the ground didn’t seem quite as fertile as I’d hoped.
Slide seven: text only, reads—
I tried teaching with Sophie Book, asking students to use the program to create literacy narratives. I soon was feeling that my students weren’t revising enough in doing this work.
In my own Sophie Book, I had proceeded somewhat intuitively, and I had revised using editing skills I transferred from alphabetic text revision. But my students’ revising skills weren’t developed enough for them to transfer them, and I couldn’t seem to get them to revise.
To be fair, lack of student revision was also an issue for me in teaching alphabetic composition, but it seemed even more intractable in relation to the multi-modal.
Slide eight: image fills entire slide— Pavement block with dividing horizontal crack in middle, with yellow paint just above and dried twigs and leaves and fine gravel just below, vertical cracks a third of the way across
Superimposed text reads— I had a hard time getting multi-modal composing to take root in my teaching.
Slide nine: image fills entire slide: sun and shadow on pavement with a large indistinct word scrawled in lower case with tar: “threat” may be the word
Superimposed text reads— True, students sometimes had their own way of doing things-- and that could be great—
Slide ten: image fills entire slide--sunny pavement with thin line of colorful leaves at top, a leaf stem a third of the way below that, and some tarry marks in the lower left quadrant
Superimposed text reads— But I couldn’t seem to ask the questions that would help students find real breakthroughs in revision (as I could sometimes do when they were revising alphabetic text).
Slide eleven: text only, reads--
As I reacted this way to my first forays into teaching multi-modal composing, I also happened to become interested in service-learning, as we were calling it then. But, I didn’t forget the multi-modal as I planned a service-learning course.
Through a fellowship, I got some digital video cameras that my students could use, as well as digital audio recorders, and we used them in interviewing formerly homeless people in the classroom as well as currently homeless people on the streets.
But, again, there was the issue of trying to teach editing and revising, complicated by the fact that there were three audio recorders and three video recorders—so students were working in groups–and, frequently, we were working in a room without computers for the students to use.
There was also the issue of permissions. In many cases, the interviewees did not want the recordings shared beyond the classroom; I opted for uploading video on Blogger, since we were already creating a class blog. The blog was limited to enrolled students, answering that privacy concern, but we had some technical problems in uploading longer videos there.
Slide twelve: text only, reads--
As for my own multi-modal work, I did not perceive that there was a market for the kind of composing I was doing—similar to the image/text slides I’ve done for this piece--and so I stopped doing it in favor of alphabetic writing, for which I did perceive a market.
Beyond that market consideration, though, I went back to alphabetic text because of my long attachment to it. The idea or the ideal of a Montaignesque essay or an old-fashioned novel (without photos, video, audio) hangs over what I do.
Looking back, I think that many of the difficulties I’ve encountered in teaching multi-modal composition really stem from my regard for alphabetic text and from my perception of a real divide between the two types of expression. The lack of computer labs, the lack of equipment, the difficulties of uploading, or problems with permissions are all real challenges. What holds me back from more effectively meeting those challenges, though, is my own propensity to cherish these little dark marks on the light page. As a person devoted to the ancient code that is the alphabet, I have a hard time really opening up to the other digital possibilities. Whatever I assign my students, I myself keep going back to working on purely alphabetic projects.
Slide thirteen: image fills entire slide—cracks forming a rough triangle extending above the frame at the top and lower right, a leaf stem bridging the crack at the upper left, a few small green plants at lower left
Superimposed text reads-- And, though I continue to work at teaching revision in at least some of the multi-modal projects I assign, it seems to me now, after working on this piece, that I need to do something else to bridge the divide between these two kinds of composition for myself: I need to do more multi-modal composing.
Slide fourteen: image fills entire slide--newer, smooth pavement with leaf stem looking like bare tree vertically positioned in center in full sun with some shadow beneath it
Superimposed text reads-- It is one thing to have some initial experience with multi-modal composing; it’s another to continue working with it. Without that continued work, the teaching of multi-modal composing may become a rootless facsimile.
Slide fifteen: image fills entire slide—sandy block of pavement with area of dirt at the bottom of frame, L-shaped crack running up from lower left quarter-mark up to middle of pavement area, then over to the right of frame. Various small green dandelion leaves along crack, with a few in the dirt below
Superimposed text reads-- Faculty, whether GSIs, adjuncts, lecturers, or tenure-track, after their initial experience with multi-modal composing, need to keep producing and publishing multi-modal work. Programs might encourage this through reminders of outlets for this kind of material, but also through creating sites for the posting of multi-modal work done by faculty. The compositions might not be of professional quality, but their creation must continue for the teaching of multi-modal composing really to thrive.
Ames: there's critical mass of people who have been to CIWIC and DMAC
Trauman: putting them into the student's seat at DMAC or CIWIC
Ames: that there's a heritage here; that there's a lineage
Corrine: you weren't judged
Jonn: and i think that just like really let so much pressure out of that room
Corrine: i really didn't have any expertise at all in digital storytelling
Suzanne: it's creating that space where okay we're all in this together
[Sound of page turning.]
Trauman [voiceover narration]: CIWIC and DMAC have a long, storied, and decorated history. The institute’s impact on the field of Computers and Writing is immeasurable. It’s provided the spark for countless articles in Kairos and Computers and Writing, and it’s been one of the major catalysts for relations and collaborations between scholars from all over the country. Six of us, each instructors here at Columbia College Chicago, sat down to discuss the impact that CIWIC/DMAC has had on each of us and on our institution. What follows is a remix of, and commentary on, that two-hour conversation as one particular theme emerged. Anyone who’s actually attended CIWIC or DMAC, or even heard whispers of its failed platforms, minor meltdowns, or secret margarita recipes, knows that one of the fundamental aspects the institute’s power is a semi-controlled chaos. A messiness, if you will. Each of us had to learn not only to accept and embrace that absence of precision, but to find a way to employ it productively in our own careers and at our own institutions. And as you’ll hear, the institute’s directors and instructors reckoned with messiness in a way that allowed it to become a mechanism for a more interactive and productive classroom where students and instructors both contribute and learn from each other. The form of this text as you’re listening to it now emerges from and attempts to capture that chaos that was our conversation and the sort of messiness from which CIWIC/DMAC draws it’s power.
[Sound of page turning.]
Pegeen: messiness
Suzanne: it's gonna make it messy, and isn't that beautiful?
Pegeen: this idea of embracing messiness
Suzanne: how you approach the messiness and how you embrace the messiness
Pegeen: a really spectacular mess
Ames: so the messiness was ridiculous
Jonn: should I try to make a break with what i'd been doing?
Suzanne: I have my own approach
Suzanne: I have messiness and failures
Ames: unbelievable
Pegeen: sometimes it's just a mess
Ames: it was a messiness, and then the product was pretty fucking great
Suzanne: we're kidding ourselves if we believe that teaching print writing has been any less messy
Ames: messiness is related to the process
Suzanne: we all approach the messiness of how it works in different ways
Suzanne: spectacular failures
Ames: nothing that you make is a mess
Pegeen: what kind of mess is productive
Suzanne: it is this way of approaching messiness
Pegeen: where should I try to not make a mess?
[Sound of page turning.]
Trauman: Messiness is an inevitable part of any composing process. We begin with an idea of what we want to produce. But as students and scholars in the process of learning these processes, our taste almost always outstrips our skill. The space between what we are capable of conceiving and what we are capable of producing is defined by error, experimentation, and learning. Finding some way to embrace this messiness opens up a space for experimentation, for confident mistakes, for productive failures.
[Sound of page turning.]
Pegeen: there's productive mess, and then there's failure
Suzanne: and productive failure
Ames: and so I'm always failing at this stuff
Pegeen: and productive failures
Ames: and because of that, and in that offering, and in that moment, people can relax and let go and try things they would not normally try
Jonn: and i think that just like really let so much pressure out of that room
Ames: there's an aesthetics to my rhetoric; that there is a sensibility that is mine, and that is immature, and that's going to develop
Ames: so therefore, when my students come to the class, and they're immature on the page, i can give them some space with that
Suzanne: and if I have access to play around with it, that's how I want to function
Ames: so, I was like, Oh, well I'm going to make this piece called chicks with dicks. So I go to the internet, and I find little chicks, and I photoshop them, and then I cut them out. And then I find dicks [laughs]. And then she's showing us how to make... animate... how to tween. And so, I was like "Wow, look! You can make that little packie.." --a packie is an artificial dick that somebody packs in their pants when you're a drag king. Just so you know. And I'm making them crawl across the screen like worms [laughs] And so the little chicks go down and "fwoop, woop!" And then they eat the little worms. So they were chicks with dicks. I was experimenting with this. It was my own thing. I realized that I have a definite composing style that I never saw until I was playing with this. I'm not really sure what that means.
Pegeen: there's this kind of lovely talent of saying, "I don't know what I'm doing, but I can do it anyway."
Suzanne: all of the stuff I know how to do is just from diving in and figuring out.
Corrine: alright, this is kind of a creative approach to the assignment, but we're gonna let it go
Suzanne: when I was at DMAC, the big thing for me was that I was thinking it's all about the in-between spaces.
[Sound of page turning.]
Trauman: Experimentation and mistakes are not always easy to accept as a student or encourage as a teacher. Engaging with emerging genres and new composing tools can often be a source of anxiety or self doubt. One of the essential experiences of CIWIC/DMAC is engaging our own composing processes beyond the limits of our current skills and understanding.
[Sound of page turning.]
Suzanne: the first day or two, it was just utter fear.
Corrine: this is not okay
Jonn: should I try to make a break with what I'd been doing?
Ames: I don't know how much this is making sense
Corrine: and this really didn't exactly fit the formula
Jonn: was it acceptable
Suzanne: you're putting yourself in the position of a student
Trauman: once you arrive at CIWIC or DMAC, you're in these uncomfortable spots, or discomfortable spots. You're now a student. You're the one without the expertise.
Suzanne: It's always good for every person who teaches to be in the seat as a student again
Trauman: putting them into the student's seat at DMAC or CIWIC
Suzanne: you need to have an empathy for what it feels like to be asked to compose in a space that is not entirely comfortable for you
Jonn: students who are under a lot of pressure and really don't get to know each other that well
Suzanne: and to be afraid of what you don't know
[Sound of page turning.]
Trauman: Struggling with and embracing this sort of anxiety allows us to access a certain empathy with our students and fellow colleagues. It serves as an excellent reminder for what it’s like navigate a seemingly challenging, high-risk environment. But that’s not to say that the anxiety is without merit. Composing with digital media IS a complex task that demands new ways of thinking in order to capitalize on new modes of communication afforded by digital media.
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Suzanne: when you're working in multiple modes, all of the things that you're piecing together and juxtaposing are done in a purposeful way to achieve your rhetorical goals
Ames: thinking about how all of these pieces and parts fit together
Corrine: we were expected to work, we were expected to work hard, we were expected to produce
Jonn: knowing that it's going to be a struggle, but feeling like, you know, I can do this, and I can make it through, so...
Suzanne: we're going to work you really hard
Corrine: I'm actually pushing them really hard
Jonn: I mean it was humbling to be in that situation
Trauman: I try to think of things my students don't know how to do. they won't already have assumptions
Jonn: I think that that's a very useful sort of humbling
Ames: so how difficult it really is to negotiate and think about all the many platforms where you're talking about digital work
Trauman: discomforting their assumptions about what writing is by putting it into a new mode
Jonn: being open to trying a new platform
Ames: you know you've got the back end technical knowledge
Trauman: that idea of discomfort and having to renegotiate these new spaces
Ames: or the front end user knowledge
Suzanne: it's about pushing yourself to compose in this way because it's a reality we can't ignore
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Trauman: Learning to compose with digital media involves pushing yourself to learn things you don’t already know. As such, CIWIC/DMAC is in it’s best case scenario, an unsettling, destabilizing experience. Part of the institute’s success lies in its conceit that a productive space of learning requires a balance between risk and safety.
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Suzanne: opening a space for that discomfort
Corrine: right, I never felt pressured
Suzanne: it's a safe space to leverage that and experiment
Corrine: you weren't judged
Ames: and I was very immature in my "Chicks and Dicks," that's clear.
Corrine: but there was never any pressure
Suzanne: It's creating that space where, okay, we're all in this together
Trauman: so we all sort of banded together and learned this thing
Jonn: they were telling me things, and helping me figure things out as we were working on these projects
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Trauman: Digital writing classrooms aren’t necessarily any more immune to unwieldy power dynamics than traditional classrooms. Insiders and outsiders. Experts and novices. Clearing a space for someone else to inhabit requires a certain amount of, well, privilege. Our conversation touched on some of Derrida’s notions of violence and generosity. A violence of making space, if you will. Most instances of generosity are fraught with a hierarchy stratified between expert and novice. Master and apprentice. Initiated and uninitiated.
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Corrine: that whole insider-outsider thing
Pegeen: it does assume a kind of power dynamic
Suzanne: sending you to your room until you feel better about it
Corrine: and you can revise and resubmit as many times until you're absolutely sick of me
Pegeen: yeah, I'll accept this project
Jonn: people will ask me about what I'm doing, and I think that makes me feel like I am an insider
Pegeen: you felt like you were part of the family
Corrine: I really didn't have any expertise at all in digital storytelling
Jonn: I guess I just automatically pretend like I know what I'm doing; I pretend like I'm an insider
Ames: that's the first time I know that I was actually a part of this community that you're talking about
Jonn: since I've been doing it now for three years, I think, you know, some of that pretending has sort of taken hold
Pegeen: there are insiders who can extend hospitality and invite you in
Jonn: you know, I felt like I wasn't an expert by any means, but I felt like I could at least participate in that conversation
Trauman: you're used to being the one with the expertise
Suzanne: there's an underlying assumption that it's not experts teaching novices
Pegeen: you were of the community that could invite other people in
Jonn: now that I feel like maybe I've crossed over, I'm wondering did I cross the right direction? [laughter] Do I really want to be an insider with this?
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Trauman: the two stories you'll hear next come from Suzanne Malley and Corrine Calice, respectively. Both share stories about their non-traditional encounters with students in which they ended up learning as much from their students as their students learned from them.
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Suzanne: I asked students to write their literacy narratives, and then turn that into a multimodal composition... and he wrote "I'm going to do to Toys-r-Us and buy a dollhouse." That was his entire proposal. It was supposed to look like... What's your conceptual metaphor? What digital assets to you think you need? How are you going to craft the story in a brief amount of time? I'm like, "Oh my god, spectacular failure!" Also, his written literacy narrative was about two and a half paragraphs long, and I kept pushing him to do more, right? And so he comes in with this spectacular stop motion film of him working with Korean, Japanese, and English. And his way of learning the language was watching Japanese movies and English movies. And he comes home and he has an A on the test. Stop motion dollhouse film! Right? Then he went back and wrote a lovely print narrative. Why? Because he composed in a stop motion film, which was different than my composing process. So what I learned as a teacher is that I now offer either way to do that. You choose the process through which you're going to arrive at these end products.
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Corrine: I get to class last night, and I'm supposed to be talking about storyboarding, and I'm like, "Shoot, I don't know a frickin' thing about storyboarding." [laughs] And I've gotta walk into class today and have a class on storyboarding. And so I say to my students, "So tell me a little bit about how you storyboard." And all of a sudden, they start pulling out of their bags these documents that they use, these templates and stuff that different departments use to teach their students how to storyboard. I didn't know what the hell I was talking about. I don't really know any storyboarding, but they know, and we're co-exploring.
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Trauman: One of the fundamental aspects of DMAC, characteristics of the summers I spent there, was the destabilization and upending of traditionally unequal relationships between instructors and students.
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Suzanne: complicate the idea of expertise
Jonn: opens up this other area where students have expertise that I don't have
Ames: it's not just me giving to students all the time. I sometimes have to accept what it is they've got to give me.
Suzanne: but the way we're conceiving of this hospitality mixed with generosity and DMAC and CIWIC complicates that violence
Ames: I think of CIWIC as having a lot of feminist methodology
Suzanne: because it's a two-way violence
Ames: and it's so queer, I have to tell you, it's a queer space
Suzanne: it is working back and forth so that the provider of the hospitality does not necessarily have all of the power
Ames: it shifts your understanding of what the normative understanding of power would be
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Trauman: It might just be that CIWIC/DMAC’s effectiveness emerges not from its wielding of power, privilege, and insider status, but from it’s very willingness to relinquish those relationships. To encourage their inversion in ways that keep the institute fresh and vital for each new class of participants. This insight and humility are exactly what ensures the institute’s continual reinvention and the vitality of its ongoing legacy across our discipline.
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